Try to laugh, please. The news is now officially parody and a game for all the family to play.

First question: Why are "we" in Afghanistan? Answer: "To try to help in the country's rebuilding programme." Who says so? Huw Edwards, the BBC's principal newsreader. What wags the Welsh are.

Second question: Why are "we" in Iraq? Answer: To "plant a western-style open democracy". Who says so? Paul Wood, the [...]

The secrets of the crushing of Yugoslavia are emerging, telling us more about how the modern world is policed. The former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia in The Hague, Carla Del Ponte, this year published her memoir The Hunt: Me and War Criminals. Largely ignored in Britain, the book reveals unpalatable truths about the west's intervention in Kosovo, which has echoes in the Caucasus.

The tribunal [...]

On 12 July, the Times devoted two pages to Afghanistan. It was mostly a complaint about the heat. The reporter, Magnus Linklater, described in detail his discomfort and how he had needed to be sprayed with iced water. He also described the "high drama" and "meticulously practised routine" of evacuating another overheated journalist. For her US Marine rescuers, wrote Linklater, "saving a life took precedence over [their] security". Alongside this [...]

The lawyer Gareth Peirce, celebrated for her defence of miscarriage of justice victims, wrote recently: "Over the years of the conflict, every lawless action on the part of the British state provoked a similar reaction: internment, 'shoot to kill', the use of torture . . . brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence. This was registered by the community most affected, but the British public, in whose name these actions [...]

In 1941, the editor Edward Dowling wrote: "The two greatest obstacles to democracy in the United States are, first, the widespread delusion among the poor that we have a democracy, and second, the chronic terror among the rich, lest we get it." What has changed? The terror of the rich is greater than ever, and the poor have passed on their delusion to those who believe that when George W [...]

The siege of Gaza has many layers. I work here as a journalist, amid near-daily air and land assaults from Israel, amid the unending killings and destruction of land and livelihood, which are all made more unbearable by critical shortages of fuel, food, medicine, electricity for hospital machinery and electricity for my work. The other day I returned from fieldwork to find cheerful news from John Pilger: that I have [...]

When I first came to live in Britain, much of ordinary life was premised on a sense of community. It was mostly undeclared; occasionally, it would become vivid, even heroic. Watching Durham miners, defeated but unbowed by hunger and debt, march back to the pit in 1985, led by their women, was a glimpse of Britain at its best. In spite of Thatcher and Blair, that communal decency survives, though [...]

When I returned to South Africa following the fall of apartheid, I asked Ahmed Kathrada to take me to Robben Island. Known affectionately as Kathy, he wore dark glasses to cover eyes damaged by the glare of the limestone where he and Nelson Mandela had wielded a pick for decades. He showed me his cell, five feet by five feet, where "the light was burning bright, day and night". I [...]

I would stroll past the Hotel Royale in Saigon and look up at the corner balcony on the first floor and see him there, camera resting on his arm. A greeting in Welsh might drift down. Or his take-off of an insane American colonel we both knew. What was he doing? Best to be patient; but this had gone on for days.

It was 1970 and we were on our [...]

"The PKK is the result of and not the reason for Turkish actions," was the curt message from the president of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), Masoud Barzani, when a British parliamentary delegation visited him shortly before Turkish troops crossed into Iraq late on Thursday 21 February. For decades, Turkish governments have denied the rights of the country's Kurds. This more than anything has fuelled the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).