Newsbook

DAVID MEPHAM, director of Human Rights Watch in Britain, discusses a new report detailing abuses carried out by Syrian opposition forces

THE war in Syria touches not just the men fighting, but increasingly women, the elderly and the very young too. Khatoon al-Bustan and her nine children gather under an olive tree in the orchards around Atmeh, a small town near the border with Turkey. The 47-year-old Syrian fled with her family five days ago from their house in Maarat al-Nasan, in the north-western province of Idlib. Shelter now consists of a blanket strung up between trees. But the family is used to being outdoors, she shrugs. “We slept outdoors in the fields for the last week because we thought they [the regime] were less likely to shell there than our houses,” she says.

FOLLOWING the German constitutional court's ESM ruling and the results of the Dutch general election, our correspondents assess whether the balance has shifted in the battle to save the euro

Cashless, portable and paperless
India’s ambitious new national health-insurance scheme is already showing results four years after its launch. But unforeseen flaws in its financial structure could be the legislation’s undoing. Our video takes a look

Xi moves in mysterious ways
Is he unwell? Has be been sidelined? The Chinese government’s refusal to explain the recent disappearance from public view of Xi Jinping, groomed as the presidential replacement for Hu Jintao, causes rumours to swirl about the Politburo

Half-pipe dreams
In 2009 an Australian skateboarder founded Skateistan, an NGO which built a skate park in Kabul.

THE murder of Christopher Stevens, the American ambassador to Libya, along with three of his colleagues at his consulate in Benghazi, Libya’s second city, was not an isolated instance of violence directed against Westerners since the fall of Muammar Qaddafi’s regime nearly a year ago. In the past few months the British ambassador’s convoy on a visit to Benghazi has been attacked. So have the offices of the Red Cross and the UN in that city, the cradle of the Libyan revolution. The perpetrators of all those crimes were thought to be Salafists espousing an extreme fundamentalist version of Islam that harks back to the days of the Prophet Muhammad.