The proponents of the ‘war on drugs’ are well-intentioned people who believe they are saving people from the nightmare of drug addiction and making the world safer. But this self-image has turned into a faith – and like all faiths, it can only be maintained by cultivating a deliberate blindness...

The fight to win legal equality for gay people is almost won in Britain – yet the taste of champagne has been tainted by an unexpected dash of blood. In the past few years, gay people have finally begun to exercise the same rights as their straight siblings, yet there...

The great cliché of our age is that we are sinking into a lobotomized celebrity culture where we worship the worthless. We jabber on about Balloon Boy while carbon emissions soar; we yammer about American Idol while Afghanistan burns. The a new headline-snatching documentary Starsuckers, released today, expresses this...

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer...

Britain is facing the real risk today of a bombing campaign that targets random civilians for death - but it is being virtually ignored. When its supporters step closer every day to mass murder, nobody notices. When its perpetrators are caught, there is (at best) a little flick of information...

Imagine it. A network of violent radicals is picking off the world's leaders one by one. They have killed the American president, the Russian head of state, the French president, the Austrian head of state, and the Spanish prime minister.

Bomb attacks are ripping through the world's richest cities: explosions...

In Russian, the phrase 'gore vidal' means "he has seen grief." As Gore Vidal is wheeled towards me across an empty London hotel lobby, it seems for the first time like an apt translation. In the eight years since I saw him last, he has lost his partner of fifty...

When does planting a tree become a revolutionary act -- and unleash an army of gunmen who want to shoot you dead? The answer to this question lies in the unlikely story of Wangari Maathai.

She was born on the floor of a mud hut with no water or...

It must be exhausting to be a monarchist, forever finding ways to pretend a family of cold, talentless snobs are better than the rest of us. They have to make gold out of mud. The system of monarchy -- selecting a head of state solely because of the womb they...

We are - at the same time - thrillingly close and sickeningly far from solving our planetary fever. The world's leaders huddled in New York City yesterday to discuss man-made global warming, in a United Nations building that will soon be underwater if they fail. They all know what has...

Would you ever march up to a destitute African who is shivering with AIDS and demand he "pay back" tens of thousands of pounds he didn't borrow -- with interest? I only ask because this is in effect happening, here, in British and American courts, time after time. Some of...

When did it die? When did our collective disgust at the sickness and sicked-up stomach juices that fuel the fashion industry get replaced by an oh-so-ironic appreciation? When did even most liberals and feminists stop snubbing it and start wrestling their way to the rope-line in search of a goody...

As the long war in Northern Ireland has ended, the IRA has emptied its weapons dumps - but will its memory dumps ever be opened? When I was a child, Gerry Adams was presented as a bearded demon, personally responsible for every bomb that blew up across my city, London....

Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine is one of the most important political books of the past decade. She takes the central myth of the right -- that since the fall of Soviet tyranny, free elections and free markets have marched hand-in-hand together towards the shimmering sunset of history --...

The English language needs periodically to be given a spring cleaning, where we scrape off the phrases that have become stuck to the floor and toss out the rotting metaphors that have fallen down the back of the settee. George Orwell warned that language will inevitably become cluttered with phrases...

Quentin Tarantino sauntered onto celluloid in the mid-1990s as a Natural Born Thriller, the boy-man who was going to stab adrenaline straight into the heart of American cinema. The movies he wrote and directed were highly stylized ballet dances of torture, hemorrhaging internal organs, and rat-a-tat-tat pop culture monologues about...

Something strange has happened in America in the nine months since Barack Obama was elected. It has best been summarized by the comedian Bill Maher: "The Democrats have moved to the right, and the Republicans have moved to a mental hospital."

The election of Obama -- a center-left black man...

On the border between Thailand and Cambodia, a mighty battle is taking place - and the outcome will determine whether millions of people live or die. If the right side falters and fails, the long list of the dead will consist overwhelmingly of children and pregnant women. But this fight...

This is the story of one of the great unspoken scandals of our times. Today, the people across the world who most need life-saving medicine are being prevented from producing it. Here's the latest example: factories across the poor world are desperate to start producing their own cheaper Tamiflu to...

What does it say about Britain that today we merrily laud a historian who celebrates the most murderous acts of the British Empire -- and even says women and children who died in our concentration camps were killed by their own stupidity? What does it say about the Republican Party...