I did like it [soldiering] in the old days, back when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns.

Even spears made us think twice....  

The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dried grass.... 

BP, the British oil giant that pledged to move "Beyond Petroleum" by finding cleaner ways to produce fossil fuels, is being accused of abandoning its "green sheen" by investing nearly £1.5bn to extract oil from the Canadian wilderness using methods which environmentalists say are part of the "biggest global warming crime" in history. 

Conrad Black, the disgraced media mogul, was yesterday sentenced to six-and-a-half years in jail by a judge in the United States for his role in a £3 million fraud.  

Lord Black of Crossharbour swindled shareholders out of more than $6 million (£2.96 million) in a fraud conspiracy with three colleagues.  

As Glenn Greenwald explains, the Democrats have also been engaging in quite the charade with their supposed outrage about the Bush administration's torture policy, given that they have retained in the leadership roles tasked with investigating Bush's intelligence abuses the very people who signed off on those abuses. 

Gulf Arab countries challenged Defense Secretary Robert Gates on American policies toward Iran and Israel Saturday, after he urged them to force Tehran to stop uranium enrichment.  

Several delegates at the regional security conference in Bahrain said U.S. was hypocritical for supporting Israeli nuclear weapons, and questioned Washington's refusal to meet with Iran to discuss the Islamic state's nuclear activities.  

In 2002, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) videotaped its officials administering harsh interrogation tactics on two al Qaeda operatives, but three years later, destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the incidents.  

Whaling is no longer the only threat to whales.

The oceans, or rather, human impacts on the oceans, have changed dramatically over the half-century since whales have been protected.  

Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of "nuclear ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons.  

But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction.

US politics has crawled through the gutter for so long, that it's easy to forget that the country was founded on ideals of freedom & human dignity. 

Or that in the past it has been led by people of character & intelligence. 

There can have been few more excruciating sights than President Bush parading the Israeli and Palestinian leaders before the cameras at the Annapolis summit on Tuesday, clasping their hands, squeezing their shoulders, pushing them together for a handshake and then leaving them to return to their seats like awkward boys summoned to the podium to be congratulated for their efforts at a school prizegiving. 

Brendan Nelson is out of touch with working families on workplace laws. 

The Liberal's extreme and unfair WorkChoices laws pushed the balance in the workplace against working families.  

An internal CIA memorandum has been obtained by Venezuelan counterintelligence from the US Embassy in Caracas that reveals a very sinister - almost fantastical, were it not true - plan to destabilize Venezuela during the coming days.  

Foreclosure filings have nearly doubled from a year ago and more people could lose their homes in 2008, according to a report released Thursday. In October, 224,451 foreclosure filings were reported nationwide, up 94 percent from October 2006. 

The Constitution protects individuals against unreasonable searches, but for this protection to have practical meaning, the courts must enforce it.