Lal Masjid under siege
A bomb attack on a police convoy in the restive northwest of Pakistan has left four dead, including a senior police official. A suicide bomber also struck a military convoy in the region, killing six soldiers and two children.
Pakistani officials believe the recent violence in the northwest to be linked to the ongoing siege of the controversial radical mosque, the Lal Masjid, in Islamabad. Dozens have died as gun battles raged on Tuesday and Wednesday between radical students and security forces.
Zeeshan Haider provides a history of Islamabad's radical bastion.
To hang or not to hang Ocalan?
Turkish commentators debate the merits of hanging jailed Kurdish militant Abdullah Ocalan. Would executing the iconic leader debilitate radical Kurdish separatism and terrorism? Or would his hanging further alienate Turkey from the good graces of international law, strengthening the hand of the Kurdish Workers' Party?
UK terrorism investigations continue
Tariq al-Daour, from Bayswater in west London, has admitted in a British court to using the internet to spread extremist and violent Islamist propaganda.
The eight suspects held in relation to the failed car bombings in Glasgow and London are all in some way related to the medical profession, either as doctors or laboratory technicians.
Investigators believe that three men from the Indian state of Karnataka were involved in the failed attacks in what is the first known incident of Indian nationals being involved in an al-Qaida-linked plot.
BNP planned bomb-fuelled "race war"
Robert Cottage and David Jackson, two members of the far-right British National party, plotted to make bombs and test chemical weapons in readiness for an expected civil war of "races" in the UK.
The question of Empire
In the New York Review of Books, William Dalrymple and Niall Ferguson exchange a war of words over the Ferguson's recuperation of interventionist, imperial history.
Civilians still fleeing Mogadishu
Residents who had returned to Mogadishu after fleeing the fighting in the city are now streaming out of the capital again in large numbers as the city remains in the throes of instability and strife.
Many Mogadishu residents recall with great nostalgia the six months of stability and relative calm provided by the ousted Islamic Courts Union.
Suicide bombers more threat than fighters
Coalition military officials in Afghanistan have described the suicide bombers in the Taliban's summer offensive as more of a threat than the radical group's core of more conventional insurgent fighters.
Home swap for safety in Iraq
Sunni and Shia in Iraq are now engaging in house swaps as neighbourhoods grow increasingly homogenous and the religious communities further segregated from one another.
