In the three days after the bombing of the Shia shrine in Samarra on 22 February, some 1,300 people, mostly Sunni, were picked up on the street or dragged from their cars and murdered....

Chongqing is the fastest-growing urban centre on the planet … Every year, 8.5 million Chinese peasants move into cities. Most of their destinations are mere specks on western maps … The names of many...

Isaac Hayes, who has provided the voice of Chef for [South Park] since 1997, asked to be let out of his contract because he had just noticed that the cartoon, about four precocious potty-mouthed...

Seven residents of a Uruguayan town were killed on Friday when they were run over by a train they were pushing as part of a reality television show.

In the last 15 years, Dublin-based IPCo and its competitors have fabricated and installed more than 1,800 watering holes in more than 50 countries … and an industry was built around the reproduction of...

I went to do something new with my Irish bank account and found I needed a “Code Card“, some post-modern version of a one-time pad challenge-response system made out of cardboard. It reminds me...

Newsweek recently gushed that “one in five males in northwest Ireland may be a descendant of a legendary fifth-century warlord.” In fact, virtually everyone with any European ancestry is descended from that man …...

Soccer, [American] football, and baseball evolved in virtually the same way. Just as baseball developed out of modifications made to the British game of rounders (the Abner Doubleday myth has been proven thoroughly unfounded),...

The Iraqi dictator [Hussein] was so secretive and kept information so compartmentalized that his top military leaders were stunned when he told them three months before the war that he had no weapons of...

Two debased US soldiers got into the bus and ordered at gunpoint the school kids in the bus to show their breasts. One US female soldier, the Iraqi bus driver indicated, putting her liberation...