A bizarre rumour that Malawi’s government is colluding with vampires to collect human blood for international aid agencies in exchange for food has led to a rash of vigilante violence
The Denver police have gathered information on unsuspecting local activists since the 1950s, secretly storing what they learned on simple index cards in a huge cabinet at police headquarters. Among those the police spied on were nuns, advocates for American Indians and church organisations.
A new Amnesty International report reveals that China’s Internet police force is brutally efficient — and becoming more so every day.
Germany is being flooded by cheap beer, selling for as little as five cents a can, as shops rush to clear stocks ahead of new charges from January to discourage throw-away containers
Slaughter, and then worse, came to Butare, a sleepy, sun-bleached Rwandan town, in the spring of 1994. Hutu death squads armed with machetes and nail-studded clubs had deployed throughout the countryside, killing, looting and burning
Determined to repel an invasion of the English language, a local authority has proposed a ban on home building by non-Irish speakers in a 60-mile stretch of Connemara coastline from Barna to Carna, near the booming city of Galway
According to a new United Nations report, despite global treaties, children are being recruited as soldiers by governments in the Congo, Burundi and Liberia and are prevalent among rebel groups in Colombia, the Philippines, Uganda and Sri Lanka
The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan was shocked at the public humiliation of a woman councillor beaten and paraded naked through a village on the orders of a powerful landlord
If a US-led war with Iraq smears blood on his hands as an American citizen, Sean Penn wants to know why — and he has come to Baghdad to find out
French is such a rich language that it now has, by state decree, two words for ‘@’ — the ‘at’ sign that has become a world-wide symbol for the Internet — but only one official way to pronounce it
The fires raging around the island continent’s biggest city, Sydney, this week are as natural to the bush as are kangaroos and emus, or sun and rain. But urban sprawl has blurred the divide between the outback and the cities, and while fires the size of England rage almost unnoticed in the remote centre of Australia, in populated areas the flames can bring death and destruction
Power surges and sags caused by bush fires in the Sydney basin have done untold damage to computing infrastructure, and highlighted the need for business continuity protection
Kaspersky Labs, a Russian anti-virus company, has apologised for an e-mailed virus alert that was infected with the very worm the message was supposedly designed to warn against
If John Le Carré were in Belgrade, he would have enough material to write at least three spy novels. Belgrade has been the main spy centre in Europe for a decade, and with an estimated 4,000 foreign spies in Belgrade now — most of them hiding behind various humanitarian, economic and non-government organisations — that doesn’t look likely to change
Jackie Ballard, the new director general of Britain’s leading animal welfare charity — the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals — wants the World Trade Organisation to start taking animal rights seriously
Green campaigners handcuffed themselves to Esso petrol pumps in Luxembourg, closing down all the company’s stations in the cheap-fuel country and widening a UK-based protest
By the year 2080, Manhattan and Shanghai could be underwater, droughts and floods could become more extreme and hundreds of millions of people will be at risk from disease, starvation and water shortages
An international consortium formed by the Agha Khan’s charity foundation has been named as Afghanistan‘s second mobile phone service provider after winning the country’s first ever public tender contract
Australia has been earmarked for a campus of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory
A pro-euthanasia group in Australia is planning to distribute exit bags
designed to help people commit suicide
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