World

Why shouldn’t one of Liberia’s most infamous psychopaths become its president? Human rights are universal and indivisible, existing as they do in an unexplored metaphysical sphere in which the European Court of Human Rights plays the role of Christopher Columbus. So it is a wonderful thing to see the court’s discoveries accepted, applied and even extended in a country in which its writ does not yet run, namely Liberia, in West Africa. There, a man called Prince Y Johnson is running for president in the forthcoming elections. When I met him, a little more than 20 years ago, he was Field Marshal Brigadier-General Prince Y Johnson, but just as he

Tonight, the Republican primary race gets serious with a debate at the Ronald Reagan presidential library in California. This is the first debate that Rick Perry, the governor of Texas and the current frontrunner, has taken part in. The Republican nomination is now a far more attractive prize than many expected it to be. 53 percent of voters now disapprove of the job Obama is doing suggesting that he is beatable. At the moment, the Republican nomination appears to be Perry’s to lose. He is benefitting from both the troubles of the Tea Party favourite Michele Bachmann, her campaign manager has just stepped down, and Republican establishment unease with the

With Colonel Gaddafi’s compound lying in ruins and every self-respecting reporter combing through the wreckage, it was only a matter of time before documents of a dictatorship became public. Most explosively, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen has found letters to and from the Secret Intelligence Service which suggest complicity in extraordinary rendition and, as was suggested on the Today Programme yesterday, an unseemly chuminess with Libya’s spies. If any part of the British state took part in illegal acts – which extraordinary rendition is – then this is a very serious matter. But it should be said no evidence has hitherto been found of this by any number of inquiries. The

Tripoli Someone somewhere must have decided it was worth keeping. Like many parents around the world, Colonel and Mrs Gaddafi were probably terribly proud of their child’s progress at school. But you can’t take everything with you when the mob is storming the barricades. So there it was strewn on a patch of sun-parched lawn, next to a bizarre take on a Swiss chalet. For your average Tripoline indulging in some light pilfering of the abandoned Bab al-Aziziya compound, it wouldn’t have been worth a second look. For anyone hunting down incriminating intelligence files linking the UK to torture in Libya, it wouldn’t have been up to much, either. But

Tripoli What to do on a weekend in revolutionary Tripoli? There’s no doubt about the city’s most popular family day out. Hundreds of cars and thousands of Tripolines drive into Bab al-Aziziya, the Gaddafi family fortress. A vast compound strictly off limits for ordinary Libyans until only a few days ago is now the scene of the unlikeliest traffic jams. Threading their way through shot-up, burnt-out armoured BMWs, drivers wind down their windows, honk their horns and shout out anything that comes to mind, “Free Libya!”, “Fuck off Gaddafi!”, “The rat is finished!” Gaddafi’s house resounds to cries of “Allahu akbar! God is great!” Crowds mill through with mobile phone

This summer I had the pleasure of listening to the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra performing in the once-ravaged Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik. The concert, conducted by the Indian maestro Zubin Mehta, was beautiful and moving. A particularly memorable moment came when a Croatian tenor sang a duet with a Serbian soprano. Under the Dalmatian sky, music served as a vehicle for human understanding and reconciliation. How different the audience – and Zubin Mehta – must have felt when the performance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall was disrupted by pro-Palestinian hoodlums, who brought the Promenade Concerts to a halt for the first time since 1895. Dissatisfied

The EU has banned imports of crude oil from Syria. This is being touted as a major success for the EU, displaying the ability of governments to act collectively. Oil sanctions on Syria should, theoretically, impede President Assad: 95 per cent of Syria’s oil is exported to Europe, worth roughly £3bn a year. Germany and Italy are the premier destinations. This is a welcome move against a brutal tyranny, but the embargo is not the total success that it might have been. Italy was stalling earlier in the week, trying to defer the deal’s implementation until 30th November 2011, when existing contracts expired. Other European countries were pushing for a more

Most of Europe takes all of August off for summer. Paris is empty, Brussels eerie and nobody works in Madrid. But as politicians and officials come back from their holidays, they are finding that the problems of the euro have not gone away. Quite the contrary. No less a supporter than former EU Commission president Jacques Delors believes that the European currency is still “on the edge of the precipice”. It is easy to see why the European grandee feels as he does. The euro eased against the dollar today, taking a cue from lower stocks; the euro was down 0.6 per cent. The losses came on top of data

As August draws to a close, Europe is bracing itself for a series of September sovereign debt crises. Events in Germany at the moment have the potential to make these crises into events that could break the back of the Eurozone. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reports, Chancellor Merkel might not have the votes to push the European Financial Stability Facility through the German parliament. Merkel is currently under attack from all angles in Germany. Helmut Kohl has criticised her foreign policy, while the German president has implied that she should not have let the European Central Bank buy up so many poor quality bonds. It is now possible to see her coalition