A familiar foe has ramped up its activities in central Africa. Raids by the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) are becoming more frequent and, as the BBC’s Peter Martell reports, a sense of alarm is spreading.

THE first day of the UN General Assembly was dominated by three men.

THE death of a key al-Qaida leader in a daring helicopter assault in Somalia caps more than a decade-long hunt by US authorities and strikes a blow to the terror group’s operation there, but it could also trigger a new spate of attacks on Western targets.

IT’S too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” that the United States has been waging for the past 39 years, but something significant is happening. 

IT’S still a nest of terrorists around here, but nobody worries about it much. These days, when you hear a helicopter at night it’s only the medevac chopper bringing some urgent case down to the main hospital at Bayonne on the coast.

“THEY have the watches, but we have the time,” say the Taliban commanders in Afghanistan, and it’s perfectly true. The election on August 20 is not going to change that.

CAN Rupert Murdoch save the newspaper industry by making people pay to read the news online? Probably not, though his reputation as a financial wizard (he is many times a billionaire) has bewitched a lot of people into believing that he can.

CHINA said on Wednesday the world should respect Myanmar’s judicial sovereignty after the junta sent Aung San Suu Kyi back into detention, triggering Western outrage but only a measured response from its neighbours.

A YEAR ago this week, Georgia attacked Russia. It was like Jamaica attacking the United States.

TWO years ago this month there were 24 left. Now they are all gone, and there is nobody alive who fought in the First World War. 

TONY Blair (or “the Winston Churchill of our times,” as he was known in the Bush White House) is not going to be the first president of the European Union. And Iceland isn’t going to join the EU either.

“THE incidents in China are, simply put, a genocide. There’s no point in interpreting this otherwise,” said Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyib Erdogan last Friday. He was talking about the deaths of at least 184 people in the recent street violence in Xinjiang, the huge province that occupies the north-western corner of China.

Former Liberian leader and war crimes suspect Charles Taylor is on trial in The Hague — the culmination of a lengthy campaign for him to be brought before an international court for allegedly backing rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone.