I've been away from Northern Ireland (NI) for ten months and as such, I'm starting to feel out of touch with political developments back home. In particular, I've been perplexed by the depth of the crisis precipitated by the IRA's robbery of 26 million pounds from a Belfast bank just before Christmas. Of course, I accept that the two governments and the other political parties in the north are right to have no faith in Sinn Fein after this robbery. But still, isn't all the shrill rhetoric...

Thirty miles from where I sit typing this is the country of North Korea, which announced last week for the first time that it has nuclear weapons. When I first heard this news I paused for a moment of trepidation. And then, like everyone else in this region, I got on with life. After all, last week's announcement was not "news" as such, but merely confirmation of what, to use the Belfast parlance, "the dogs in the street know". Like it or not, we in north east Asia are learning to live with t...

When someone you care about is terminally ill, their death can be the cause of guilty satisfaction on your part. "At last", you think to yourself, "the suffering is over". I feel a little like that this week following the summit between Mahmoud Abbas and Ariel Sharon in Sharm-al-Sheikh. At the meeting in Egypt, the two leaders agreed to a ceasefire ending the four-year old intifada. The uprising, which has been in intensive care for more than half its life, has finally been put out of its mis...

At the top of the Newtownards Road in east Belfast stretches one of the longest murals in Northern Ireland (NI), a collection of street art celebrating loyalist paramilitarism which encompasses an entire block. Alongside the predictable images of masked gunmen, there are some more unusual touches like the attempt to claim the Declaration of Arbroath and the legendary figure Cuchulainn as loyalist symbols. At one point, if you look closely you can see a crest bearing the legend "their...

It is only two months since the death of Yasser Arafat, yet already the new political lexicon created by his demise has descended into meaningless cliche. I refer here to the oft-quoted "window of opportunity" ( WofO ) which, we are led to believe has been opened by Abu Ammar's passing. This term has quickly become the hopelessly innacurate short-hand of the politically illiterate, already rivalling "coalition of the willing" and "ethical foreign policy" for toe-curling cringe-worthiness. ...

Link Actions like this are "worthy" of the Brownshirts. My deepest respect to Eugene and his family for standing their ground.

One of the most infamous incidents in the history of the House of Commons occured in 1972 during a debate about the murder of 14 civilians in Derry by the British army - Bloody Sunday. At one point Bernadette Devlin, who had witnessed the slaughter first-hand, rose from her seat, strode across the august chamber and punched home secretary Reggie Maudling in the mouth. Predictably this caused uproar. While Devlin's action was certainly "un-parliamentary", no one got seriously hurt that day...

Prediction, like alcohol, makes fools of us all, so here goes: 1. Iraq The elections will be held in most of the country and then guess what? The violence will go on. The country will descend even deeper into anarchy and despair. At some stage this year it is possible that the American public will reach a tipping point when a majority realise that, for everyone's sake, their troops have to leave. It is at this point that one should expect the US right to start thrashing around...

Year-end obituaries tend to suggest some commomn thread running through the twelve months in question. There is supposed to be a theme, 2004: The Year Of X. But this is a conceit. 2004 was not the year of X, or Y, or even Z. It was just a period of time. In this past twelve months new trends became apparent, established trends continued and old trends faded away. People lived and died, laughed and cried as they do every other year. With this in mind, I will eschew all narrative in my humbl...

You know how it is. You're compiling your Christmas card list when the name of an old friend springs to mind. You're unsure whether or not said old pal should receive a card. You were thick as thieves once, but that was long ago. Would sending a card now make up for all that time or would it just serve to highlight the distance that has grown between you? It's a tough one, no doubt. As for us mere mortals, so for The Most Powerful Man On Earth, Gerorge W Bush. The US President has spent th...

One Saturday last year I was browsing the shelves of a basement book shop in Taipei, my home at the time. Having made a purchase, I was walking up the stairs back to the street when I was confonted by something quite unexpected - quiet. Taipei must rank as one of the world's noisiest cities, with traffc roaring by twenty-four hours a day. But as I stood there, I couldn't see a single car on the road, not one of the ubiquitous yellow taxis, no buses being driven by madmen and not a single scoo...

Public protest is a vital part of any true democracy. When people are angry about something, it's right and healthy that they should take to the streets to voice their unhappiness. To the thousnads of British citizens who have protested, and who continue to protest, against their government's insane support for Bush's war in Iraq, I say "more power to you." But protest is not enough. Another sign of a healthy democracy is the ability to address the concerns of protestors within the politic...

"Remember that when Arafat was still regarded as a superterrorist...the Israelis encouraged the Hamas to build mosques and social institutions in Gaza. Hamas and the Israelis had very close relations when the PLO was still in exile in Tunisia. I can remember being in southern Lebanon in 1993 reporting on the Hamas, and one of their militants offered me Shimon Peres' home phone number. That's how close the relations were!" Robert Fisk, April 2002 In the 1970s and 80s, Israel, like m...

One of the most popular myths in the corridors of power in Tel Aviv and Washington is the notion that the Israeli/Palestinian conflcict could be solved easily were it not for the obstructionism of Palestinian president, Yasser Arafat. If nothing else, Arafat's imminent death will soon show this belief to be a fiction. It is of course convenient for Bush and Sharon to place all the blame for the conflict at Arafat's door, since it absolves them and their countries from any responsibility f...

So much of life in the occupied West Bank seems to revolve around the management of boredom. Life under occupation involves dealing with a number of delays to your every day life, whether queueing at a checkpoint or sitting around waiting for the latest closure to be lifted. The sheer tedium of Palestinian life is the only part which an outsider can fully experience. Three years ago I was sitting in a school in the city of Nablus, watching hour after hour tick by, waiting for the latest c...