The people of Scotland will go to the polls in September next year to determine whether the country should achieve independence from the United Kingdom.

As the blue in the Union Jack represents the Scottish national flag (the Saltire, or flag of St Andrew), there has already been debate in Britain about whether the flag would need to be amended should the Scots choose to go it alone.

Si chou zhi lu ("Silk Road" in Mandarin). What's in a name? Trouble. A lot of trouble. At least if you ask the Pentagon, which places most of these roads - from the Persian Gulf to Central Asia and even the South China Sea - smack in the middle of its famous "arc of instability". In parallel, in rising Eastern latitudes, it's Dream Team time: and the name of the game is Eurasian integration.

Six mass grave sites dating back to the 1936 Palestinian uprising and the 1948 Nakba were discovered around the Jaffa cemetery, the al-Aqsa Foundation for Endowment and Heritage reported Wednesday, revealing hundreds of bodies of Palestinians killed by Zionist forces.

“During [the foundation’s] repair and maintenance work on the [Kazkhana] cemetery, we discovered nozzles to dig into the ground

The sharp drop in Japan’s Nikkei stock market index last Thursday and subsequent global share sell-off have highlighted mounting instability in world financial markets.

The Nikkei went down by 7 percent and then showed considerable volatility on Friday, before ending the day marginally higher. In the United States, markets posted their first weekly loss after a month of record highs.

Our Rendition Flights Database has been compiled in collaboration with Reprieve, and represents the world's largest set of public flight data relating to those aircraft suspected of involvement in the global network of renditions, secret detention and torture. The interactive here has been produced in collaboration with Craig Bloodworth from The Information Lab, and allows users to search for, an

The International Crisis Group (ICG) sells itself as "working to prevent conflict worldwide" but there is one country where their mission looks more like promoting rather than preventing conflict. Exhibit A is their report on Venezuela, released on Friday.

There is a lot wrong with this report -- most of it reads like a statement from the Venezuelan political opposition, rather than a neutral

One feels sympathy for U.S. President Barack Obama. Whatever he does in Syria, he is doomed. Had he intervened a year ago, as many pundits demanded, he might presently be in the midst of a quagmire with even more pundits angry at him, and with his approval ratings far lower than they are. If he intervenes now, the results might be even worse. Journalists often demand action for action's sake, see

Why did the invasion of Iraq result in cultural destruction and killings of intellectuals? Convention sees accidents of war and poor planning in a campaign to liberate Iraqis. The authors argue instead that the invasion aimed to dismantle the Iraqi state to remake it as a client regime. Post-invasion chaos created conditions under which the cultural foundations of the state could be undermined. T

Why does the Fed need to explain what they are doing now?

Well it isn’t because everything is going just fine. Put it this way. They must figure when you have 50 million people on food stamps and the Dow Jones is going up a few hundred points a week and making all time highs and you have 16 trillion dollars in debt and interest rates are zero, its best to have a communiqué every month before s

With still so many unanswered questions regarding what took place on the ground in Boston after the bombing, it's time to look at an extra, possible Top Ten list of lingering absurdities. And this without sidestepping other unanswered crucial questions, such as why a bomb drill - organized by Craft - was going on during the marathon at which the bombing took place; and why it was vehemently denie

Carmen Reinhart and Ken Rogoff came as close to celebrity status as an economist can ever come, with their book, This Time Is Different. They claimed that 800 years (!) of financial history proves that high government debt ratios lead to low economic growth. Governments all over the world took heed and downsized, adopting austerity that cost millions upon millions of workers their jobs.

But it

Richie Havens, who marshaled a craggy voice, a percussive guitar and a soulful sensibility to play his way into musical immortality at Woodstock in 1969, improvising the song “Freedom” on the fly, died on Monday at his home in Jersey City. He was 72.

Mr. Havens embodied the spirit of the ’60s — espousing peace and love, hanging out in Greenwich Village and playing gigs from the Isle of Wight t

Margaret Thatcher horrified her advisers when she recommended that the government should revive the memory of Oliver Cromwell - dubbed the butcher of Ireland - and encourage tens of thousands of Catholics to leave Ulster for the south.
A year after she was nearly killed in the IRA's 1984 Brighton bomb, the then prime minister expressed dismay at Catholic opposition to British rule when they

Old Mohamed Said al-Sauda from Deraa, in his tawny gown and kuffiah headscarf, sat at the end of a conclave of tribal elders, all newly arrived in Damascus for an audience with no less than the President himself. They sat – only one woman in a blue dress among them – round a long table in the Damas Rose Hotel drinking water and coffee, rehearsing their anxieties. How should they talk to the young

Cressida'a half sister is Isabella Calthorpe and their mother happens to be Lady Mary Gaye Curzon, the daughter of the 6th Earl Howe and a descendent of King Charles II.