Current affairs

GUANTÁNAMO BAY - I write this from the United States Detention Center at Guantánamo Bay, where I have been held without charge for almost seven years.

MOSCOW - Colonel Yuri Budanov is a convicted rapist and murderer. After serving half his prison sentence for the rape and murder of an 18-year-old Chechen, Elsa Kungayeva, he was released last December.

At 100 days, the political vital signs of President Obama and his administration are robust. The averages of public polls published by Pollster.com show the president's job approval at 62.2 percent.

It was at an Arab League summit in Beirut in 2002 that Saudi Arabia's Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, then crown prince, took a political gamble by unveiling a rare comprehensive peace proposal to Israel to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.

LONDON - George W. Bush has started work on his memoirs. Count to ten before you respond.

The anxiety over Jacob Zuma's election as president of South Africa obscures a significant milestone: for the first time in decades, a sub-Saharan nation has at its helm a champion of ordinary people.

Barack Obama's initial statement on the torture memos and his remarks at CIA headquarters suggested that the release of the facts of the case would be accompanied by a policy of refraining from prosecutions.

Former CIA Director Hayden and Bush's Attorney General Mukasey published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week that argued, in essence, that using torture works.

ABSTRACT

Salman Rushdie's latest novel "The Enchantress of Florence", is a magical flight of the imagination that amounts to more than fine literature. It is a rare feat of mental discipline, produced as a fatwa hangs over the author.

LONDON - All epoch-defining events are the result of conjunctures - the correlation of normally unconnected events that jolt humanity out of a rut.

President Obama's recent trips to the G-20 in Europe and the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad have underscored his fundamental realignment of American foreign policy - a shift that will make America both militarily and economically more secure.

President Obama's statement on releasing the Bush-era torture memos is a curious and depressing document, but it bears the marks of having been revised with care by the president himself. He takes the occasion to assure the country that a dark age has passed.

Several callers ringing the middle-brow Radio 4 station in England a fortnight ago were concerned about one thing: that placing disestablishment of the Church of England back on the agenda was a serious mistake.

PRINCETON - Last month, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation.