During U2's live stream from the Rosebowl it seemed that the unthinkable has happened. Bono has started editing himself. There was still some of that naff self righteous patter, but I remember U2 concerts when you could retire to the back stalls for a bit of a snooze between songs...

Like any Asian capital city, Manila is a magnet for people from the countryside wanting to make a better living. The city groans to over capacity; squatter villages and shanty towns spring up and ten years later they have taken permanent hold with their own infrastructure (usually involving illegal electricity...

The news theme pounded out. Bing and Precious announced that Noynoy was going to run for president. The tape rolled, and there was Noynoy Aquino standing on a platform surrounded by his sisters, Ballsy and Pinky.

After the political news, Precious turned to the lighter side of life, and...

New research indicates that 80% of Afghanistan now has a permanent Taliban presence and that 97% of the country has "substantial Taliban activity."

The International Council on Security and Development (ICOS) has followed the movement of the Taliban throughout Afghanistan since 2007, by tracking third party public daily reports...

The Philippines has not yet recovered from its official mourning period for former President Corazon Aquino, the "mother of democracy," who died last month. Monsoonal waves of love are still washing over her family. There has been near hysteric pressure on her only son, Senator Benigno 'Noy Noy' Aquino III...

In an ending we didn't have to take bets on, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi was sent back to the prison that is her own home. John Yettaw - the obviously mentally damaged man who tried to warn her of the impending doom that he saw so vividly in his...

On Wednesday night when I got home, I turned on the TV for some late night viewing. At the witching hour, surfing through the endless channels of crap that is Philippines television, I was mesmerized by the tributes to Corazon Aquino that took up every commercial break. Slow-mo montages accompanied...

I had been living in Burma for several months when I headed over the border to India and north to McLeod Ganj. I was off on one of those Western rites of passage - the Buddhist retreat. The retreat went for ten days. I lasted barely two and the truth...

That old chestnut question "name six people you would love to have to dinner" usually holds no surprises. The guest list from many liberal, forward-thinking (and may I also point out -- male) types will include Aung San Suu Kyi. She is regarded as the epitome of elegance and sacrifice....

Mike Tyson -- one of the world's greatest philosophers -- once said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.

Which could well be a short hand way of looking at American foreign policy since 2001, or more specifically, looking at the current plan to get...

Of all the things I might like to do in the second half of 2009, standing in the Afghanistan Presidential elections and taking on the Taliban, rampant corruption and the world's biggest drug cartels would be pretty low on my list. But then, I could never figure out why Benazir...

Remember when we just couldn't get enough of Imelda Marcos? The woman who put shoe obsession on the global watch-list long before Carrie Bradshaw was even conceived, was the epitome of despotic greed, proudly showing off her walk-in wardrobe of 3000 pairs of shoes and obliviously parading her jewels and...

Watching the television as the 25 year war in Sri Lanka was announced as having finally -- if you can believe it -- reached its dénouement, I was struck again by one of the truly great horrors of life in Asia. The very bad male jet black hair dye job.

Sometime during my first week of work as a journalist on exchange at the Times of India (Bombay office) I strolled into the newsroom wearing an approximation of Indian dress. A long kameez (tunic) over salwar (loose pants) and a tres chic dupatta (long and wide scarf) draped elegantly, or...

One of the least popular decisions facing those engaged in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) is, how, if and when do we negotiate with the Taliban?

The idea sounds like political death. And extremely distasteful. How do you negotiate with a band of terrorists who seem to have no "off' switch, who...

For a while in 2008, international intelligence agencies thought Baitullah Mehsud was dead. Like his cousin-in-arms, Osama bin Laden, Mehsud suffers from chronic ailments, including diabetes, kidney problems and hypertension. Kidney collapse and lack of medical care was said to be the cause of death.

But it seems that...

It sure ain't the prettiest town in the world; it is dusty, grimy and overwhelmingly brown. You could bore everyone witless reading out a shopping list of the amenities Kabul lacks, and somewhere tucked into that endless list would be green space.

Combine that need with a one-man hurricane named...

The public flogging of a 17 year-old Pakistani girl, identified as Chand Bibi, has caused the usual international hand wringing.

Ban Ki-Moon, the UN Secretary General described the flogging as "unacceptable." I would have thought being served bad coffee at the UN Executive Dining room would be classified as "unacceptable."...

President Hamid Karzai has blamed "foreigners" for exaggerating the amount of corruption in Afghanistan. Last week he reiterated the dastardly plot, sounding like a Burmese general fulminating against foreign stooges.

"The government is not what they [foreigners] say," he said. "Some of the things they say is just political...

Just like Botox, the practiced eye can tell if someone has been applying fair-skin creams, or fairness creams. There's a flat kind of paleness to the face, seemingly devoid of color and pigmentation; like a burn victim well on their way to recovery. Benazir Bhutto always struck me as the...