The ghost of the other, deadlier 9/11 has returned to stalk Latin America. On Sunday morning, a battalion of soldiers rammed their way into the Presidential Palace in Honduras. They surrounded the bed where the democratically elected president, Manuel Zelaya, was sleeping, and jabbed their machine guns to his chest....

It is now forty years since the start of a riot for freedom in a small tavern in New York City -- and the riot has never stopped. It is spreading slowly across the world, to every continent, to Mumbai and Shanghai and Dubai. Everywhere it goes, it wins, in...

While the world nervously watches the uprising in Iran, an even more important uprising has been passing unnoticed -- yet its outcome will shape your fate, and mine.

In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the...

Are we witnessing an anti-1979 -- a democratic uprising against the Ayatollahs by the grandchildren of the revolution? On the streets of Tehran, many of the massed millions are chanting: "We will die - but count our votes." The religious police are trying to teargas and truncheon this cry into...

In 1965, the American astronaut Edward White dropped a glove, and ever since it has been orbiting the earth at 17,000 miles per hour. This sounds like a quirky Trivial Pursuit answer -- what is the deadliest garment in history? -- but it could be about to give us all...

Last Thursday the British public queued at their polling stations to quietly and politely lay three ticking bombs under British politics. If we don't hear the tick-tock and steadily defuse the voters' anger, the eventual blasts will damage Britain for decades to come.

The first shelf-full of Semtex was aimed...

In the babbling Babel of 24/7 news -- where elections, bailouts and beheadings blur into one long shriek -- the slow-motion stories that will define our age are often lost. An extraordinary documentary released next week, The End of the Line, forces us to stop, and see. Its story...

In a few weeks, a group of quiet, dignified elderly men and women will arrive in London to explain how the forces of the British state crushed their testicles or breasts with plyers. It was part of a deliberate policy of breaking a civilian population who we regarded as "baboons",...

What will endure from the plays of the late twentieth century? Already, the theatre that caused the greatest fuss at the time -- the In Yer Face shockers by Mark Ravenhill, Martin McDonagh and friends -- look flashy and shallow and strangely dated; only Sarah Kane's psychological slashing seems to...

I've had thousands of emails from Dubai since my expose of the city first appeared here and in the Independent. They have been overwhelmingly positive, although my favorite from an angry Dubai expat said: "Of course I hold my maid's passport. I paid good money to get her here...

And so America has finally stumbled on a political issue of real significance. No, not the trifling matters of economic collapse, global warming, or two wars. No -- the issue of the day is John Edwards' dick.

Since Elizabeth Edwards published a book about the supremely trivial fact that...

The celebrations of the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's ascent to power have had a surreal quality. The moist panegyrics from David Cameron and Boris Johnson - followed by an army of cheering commentators, and a distant, shameful echo from Gordon Brown - have been filled with statements...

This is the age of the conspiracy theory. In the interstices of the internet, no global event happens by accident - or as it seems at first glance - any more. While the truth is slowly getting its boots on, a paranoid counter-narrative is broadbanded across the world in a...

A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue this global pandemic - and all the deaths we are about to see - is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making...

Nobody feels like hanging out tinsel to mark Barack Obama's first one hundred days - least of all the President himself. After the cheering crowds in Grant Park and the choked-up crowds on Inauguration Day went home, he has been left with a depression, a slew of wars, and an...

'Geo-engineering' sounds like a bland and technical term -- but it is actually a Messianic movement to save the world from global warming, through dust and iron and thousands of tiny mirrors in space. It is also the last green taboo. Environmentalists instinctively do not want to discuss it. The...

How thin is the skin of civilization? How easily does it break and become an open, suppurating wound? These were the questions that sear through every page of the late J.G. Ballard's novels -- and they will be the questions of the twenty-first century. Ballard believed that human beings...

Show me what scares you, and I will show you your subconscious leeching out into the world. Every culture - every person - imagines there are terrors waiting for us in the dark: the shape of the monsters changes from year to year, but the fear remains. Man, it seems,...

In the smoking rubble of market fundamentalism, we are all being forced to rethink the principles that order our societies - and one small, shining idea is rising from the wreckage. It is the idea of human equality.

The need for us to return to this, our best and...

I have met children who became killers several times in my life: in the warzones of the Congo and the Central African Republic, and in the grey Young Offenders' Institutes of Britain. When I read about the events that are alleged to have happened last weekend in South Yorkshire,...