Will Heaven

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Originally published in The Catholic Herald - 10th January, 2010 edition
Perhaps I should have carried on with the leftovers of Christmas television. Or hunted down a board game. But instead, with a few friends, I sat down last week to watch The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, a film (based on the book by John Boyne) [...]

Should Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the suspect in the Fort Hood shooting, face the death penalty if he is convicted of murdering 13 Americans in cold blood? The US Army psychiatrist only regained consciousness over the weekend and has yet to face questioning. But experts are already debating what will happen to the suspected shooter [...]

A senior Arab Afghan adviser to al Qaeda and the Taliban has openly challenged an Australian counter-terrorism expert in a series of blog posts. Abu Walid al Masri has written direct responses to Leah Farrall, an Australian academic who writes the All things Counter Terrorism blog and has years of experience fighting terrorism with the Australian Federal [...]

In the next few weeks a man who has won the Nobel Peace Prize will decide whether to send 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. There are, President Obama won’t need reminding, arguments for and against the surge. And few people have set out the arguments against better thanJohann Hari. Writing in the Independent, he states that [...]

Those who dismiss the threat of a nuclear Iran fail to appreciate the true nature of that country’s regime. Consider, if you will, the suicide bomb which yesterday killed 42 people in Sistani-Baluchistan (a region of Iran which borders Afghanistan and Pakistan). General Noor Ali Shooshtari, the deputy commander of the Guard’s ground forces, was killed – [...]

Top of the agenda for William Hague, who spoke in the last hour on security and international affairs, was Afghanistan. “Our forces won’t be there forever”, he said, and a Conservative government would work with Nato and President Obama for a new strategy. But the Shadow Foreign Secretary focused mainly on a new five-point plan [...]

From my Telegraph blog:
The proposed talks between the US and Iran have faltered. This much is clear from the remarks made by Mahmoud Ahmadinejdad to Britain’s ambassador in Tehran yesterday. But here’s a question: did the White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, have anything to do with it?

From my Telegraph blog:
The Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez made a surprise visit to theVenice Film festival today to see Oliver Stone’s new documentary film “South of the Border“, which is about… er, him. I’m not in Venice at the moment, so cannot say for sure whether Stone’s film mentions Chavez’s friendship with the Iranian President Mahmoud [...]

From my Telegraph Blog:
Iran Solidarity, a new UK based anti-regime group, has so much going for it. It has been backed by some big names: AC Grayling, Richard Dawkins, Douglas Murray – and a host of Iranian human rights organisations to boot. The wording of their petition is commendable, too. It calls for the “immediate release [...]