Featured Today

Saudi Arabia offered an explanation early yesterday for what had happened to journalist Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul, 17 days after he went missing at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul.

Doing what I do in the places I do it, I cannot be neutral on this one. I can be fair-minded yes, but neutral no. The bodies of dead friends get in the way. I saw Abdul Shariff gunned down before my eyes in South Africa in 1994. A bullet went through his back and dented the Nikon camera around his neck. I heard his cry of agony as the young men dragged him out of the line of fire. He was dead before he got to hospital. Gunmen had opened up on a group of journalists and politicians. I have mourned another friend, Kate Peyton, assassinated in Somalia in 1995. She was a lovely, decent human being, and a journalist of absolute integrity.

In Yemen, a three-year conflict has produced what UN officials call "the worst man-made humanitarian crisis of our time". Markets, hospitals and other civilian sites have been repeatedly attacked. Disease and hunger rival bombs and gunfire as the biggest dangers to ordinary people. Yemen was already the poorest country in the Middle East; the war has pushed it toward famine.