The Taliban doused Kabul in a grim monasticism but the capital of Afghanistan is today a chaotic mulch of prospectors and carpetbaggers. The city clinks with foreign bidders vying for billions of dollars of telecoms, irrigation and construction contracts, sparking a property boom that has forced rental prices to match those in London, Tokyo or [...]

Britain is sick. At least four nights in 10 we are out of it. Suspicious of the abstemious and jealous of other people’s hangovers, we are a nation of caners forever seeking ways to escape the pressures of consciousness. For more than a decade it was pills and capsules that took our minds off the [...]

In a Belgian suburb, as crisp and tidy as cotton sheets, Marc Dutroux built a dungeon. Fastidiously constructed in the basement of an unexceptional home in the winter of 1994 it was a little more than two metres long and a little less than a metre wide. The unemployed electrician calculated that by laminating the [...]

Our car rumbles besides glistening rice paddy and through Vietnamese villages one-house-deep. We pass a duck-filled pond, chicken-soup shacks crammed with diners entangled in bowls of rice noodles, egg sellers, goose-down plumpers and makeshift poultry slaughterhouses snicking and chopping. Improvised electric plucking machines thrum, their stiffened rubber fingers snatching the feathers from broken-necked fowl. Unwanted [...]

Striking posters are appearing across the country. Celebrities including LL Cool J, Christina Aguilera and Ashley Judd are photographed with their hands clasped over their ears or with their mouths sealed with masking tape. Below, the relevant bit of the age-old adage is spelt out – Hear no evil, See no evil, Speak no evil [...]

There are beguiling days on Koh Samui when a collar of mist descends on the Thai island making it difficult to tell the sea from the sky. Fishermen call these ‘days without prayer’ when no one can trust what they see and boats dare not set sail. On a day like this, at 10am, on [...]

On April 11, Gordon Pilakui had girlfriend trouble. According to his family the 24-year-old had been arguing with her every since they got together. He was jealous. She didn’t care. Their ability to make peace was skewed, according to friends, by too much beer and spliff. But no one expected Gordon Pilakui to die. April [...]

Sixteen years after the fall of Communism, the West still barely understands the East. What has prevented us from getting to know the Russians as they see themselves is not just the isolationism wrought by seven decades of Communism or the machine-code complexity of the Slavic languages. What has kept the West from knowing what [...]

There is a family home where I have never been (writes Adrian Levy). But as a child my grandmother described it so lovingly that nowadays, whenever I am stuck somewhere, grinding my teeth on a go-slow story, it is to this house that my mind wanders. With its scalloped roof and lime-rendered walls, the dream [...]