Between 1914 and 1921, Britain overthrew an authoritarian regime in Baghdad that was a threat to Western power in the Middle East. The British said that they had come as liberators, not occupiers. Shortly after the British occupied the region, they w

With commentary and analysis from our man on the spot in Baghdad, ace reporter Roy Rubberplunger!Today in an unexpected move, the Charcoalition handed over complete control of the colour purple to the US appointed Interim Government.This was two days

22nd June 2004.In the late morning I awoke, I must have slept twelve hours the least, but refreshed and ambitious for the anicent fastness of Luang Prabang - I was impatient to wander.But the landlady was waiting.How she knew I never knew but Chittin

The people looked upon Father Samaan as their guide in the field of spiritual and theological matters, for he was an authority and a source of deep information on venial and mortal sins, well versed in the secrets of paradise, hell, and purgatory. Fa

Heading north from Chiang Rai for about an hour, the River Kam slinks around the tall cliffs, and high on one of these cliffs perches an ancient monastery, the Wat Maa Tong, or the Golden Horse monastery. The Golden Horse shrine is reputed to date ba

In Texas, a pleasure boat was sunk yesterday when it happened to be passing a nudist beach. On being told that the two decker boat was passing the nudist beach on the starboard side, passengers rushed to the upper deck with their cameras. The captain

The menace of the traffic cone is set to reach new and frightening heights with the announcement from Nebraska that its university engineers have created robotic cones that can be moved by remote control or even more frighteningly, by themselves.The

Joh Leh Beh and some 200 other Karen villagers are forest dwellers that live in Kanchanburi's Thung Yai forest.Or rather they used to.At the beginning of May, the start of the rainy season, Joh and other villagers were busy preparing their land for t

June 21stAt the docks of Luang Prabang, there was the usual mad scramble of locals trying to persuade you stay at their guesthouses, being the rainy or low season there was little problem in finding somewhere to stay.A number of us on the slow boat h

June 20th, 2004I had hope for a decent nights sleep, but the fan in the guesthouse room hardly worked as the electricity failed time and again and in the end I just switched the damn thing off.And every minute, on the minute, outside a cockerel cro

June 19thWhat is it about rivers that fascinate? I sat high above the Mekong in a stilt house restaurant, a beer in one hand a book in another, but my eye was always drawn down to the scene below. Barges were loading and unloading, elephants the same

June 19th, 2004A short hop on a speed boat and I was suddenly in Laos, at the customs in Laotian Ban Huay Sai.I had to pay a 15 baht surcharge to the Laotian customs apparently because it was Sunday, even though it was actually Saturday. When I point

June 18th, 2004Like any frontier town in my experience, there's an air of giddy excess among the wayfarers.Here are the smugglers, the drug and people traffickers, those anxious about what is to come in the country ahead and those relieved to have le

18th June 2004I'd said goodbye to Alex, we'd had breakfast together, and then this strange and haunted soul and I bade each other farewell. I left some books with him, and he pressed upon me some personal ones of his own, somehow I knew that Alex and

Now I'm going to share something with you women.I have the most incredible penis. Sometimes I think its actually disappeared back into my body as I rummage around trying to find the little bugger. Where the hell is it? Have I been castrated or someth

'We are not able to do our jobs. We are not even monitoring what is happening'.These are the words of Riaj Gok, a UN civil education officer in Kandahar, Southern Afghanistan. Meanwhile, 15 Chinese construction workers in the North of the country wer

In a recent speech to the Police Federation conference in Bournemouth, Home Office minister John Denham told delegates at the  that it was time to 'get down to the nitty gritty' on police training. There was uproar. Senior police officers critice

The Ballyshannon foundered off the the coast of Cariboo,And down in fathoms many went the captain and the crew;Down went the owners -- greedy men whom hope of gain allured:Oh dry the starting tear, for they were heavily ensured.Besides the captain an

Token,You wrote,'I seem to pick up some important cultural vibe regarding singing. What's the deal with that? Am I tripping or is there something about the Welsh and singing.'The Welsh have always been a race along the bardic tradition.In the sense t

Ferabo,'We need the Ottomans back. They knew how to deal with these pesky dissidents...Kurds...Armenians...'At least they had the sense to keep 'Iraq' in three seperate provinces.There's a popular theory that following the Gulf War 1 the West

We are in Chechnya, it is 1994.Shiram is eight years old.She lives with her father, her mother and five sisters. Her father is part of the resistance movement against Russian rule. Suddenly the door to their home is kicked in, Russian troops pour in

The earth is many thousands of miles deep and the realm that we occupy is simply a thin sliver on the surface that we dwell within most perilously.Between the harsh vacuum of space and the violent plasmas of the fiery deeps we dwell between, we exi

In 1864, 163 Cheyenne Indians, mostly women and children, were slaughtered by US cavalrymen at Sand Creek, Oklahoma.It nearly wiped out the Cheyenne and the Arapaho, who were chief among the victims of the brutal slaughter.It was one of the most depr

With one speech down and five to go, it is clear that the date set in some stone for sovereingty, June 30th, is being pushed by Bush and Blair as the date when the US led occupation of Iraq formally ends and Iraqi 'sovereignty' will begin.The topplin