My honeymoon with the Democrats has long since passed. Our relationship has turned sour, and I’m in no mood to marry again Anyone who has ever gone through a divorce or marital separation knows how traumatic it can be

Karl Rove is proud that the US used water torture to break the will of prisoners and foil terror plots A senior adviser to former US president George Bush has said he is proud that the country used waterboarding to elicit information from terrorism suspects. Karl Rove , Bush’s chief political strategist for much of his presidency, defended the interrogation approach authorised during Bush’s tenure, saying he was “proud we used techniques that broke the will of these terrorists”

It’s better for Obama to have the odd puff if the alternative is keeping all that stress bottled up inside The Guardian kicked the habit long ago, banning smoking from the office years before it became the law of the land.

Intentional or not, the announcement of new settlements in East Jerusalem may push the US into a tougher stance towards Israel It’s not the first time that Israel has stiffed Barack Obama over his attempts to kick-start Middle East peace negotiations. But the sudden, highly inflammatory announcement of plans to build an additional 1,600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem , in the midst of a visit to Israel of US vice-president Joe Biden, was certainly the most brutally contemptuous rebuff so far to American peacemaking.

The spiritual home of the Taliban will be the scene of intense US efforts to crush the rebels this summer, the most significant struggle of the year After three hours of lugging heavy gear around Arghandab, a lush valley flanking Afghanistan’s second city of Kandahar, and with the sun about to set, the men of Bravo company were hungry: they were beginning to think about chow.

Blast in eastern Pakistani city far from Afghan border kills at least 11 and injures scores more A suicide car bomber has struck at a building where police interrogate high-value suspects in Lahore in eastern Pakistan, killing at least 11 people and wounding scores more, including women and children heading to school, officials said today . The attack broke what had been a relative lull in major violence in Pakistan.

Party and voter-generated online content played a big part in the election of Barack Obama, but Britain is likely to see something different This is the year that the internet is taking centre stage in British electoral politics. The once-patient news cycle is being supplanted by the always-on networked public sphere; spinmasters, reporters, bloggers and citizen journalists are jousting for attention online; and voters are coming to rely on online sources – including their own social networks – for political information and analysis more than ever before. But despite all the attention paid to the 2008 elections in the United States, Britons will be sorely disappointed if they expect anything like the massive internet-powered levels of participation that we witnessed here around Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency

Sunni insurgency vowed to disrupt poll, but security dragnet and curfew keep away would-be suicide bombers Despite mortar attacks and low expectations, Iraqis have today voted in large numbers in a national poll that is widely being seen as a defiant attempt to shake free from four years of political torpor and the remnants of the American occupation. Up to 70% of registered voters in Baghdad were thought to have cast ballots for a new leader, despite the biggest surge in daily violence in more than two years, that killed at least 36 people and wounded dozens more. Early figures released by the Independent High Election Commission showed turnout was also solid in other areas of the country, especially in Sunni-dominated Anbar province, where more than 50% of voters turned up, reversing the mass boycott of the 2005 poll

California-born American was charged with treason and had $1m reward offered for his arrest A US-born spokesman for al-Qaida has been arrested, Pakistani authorities said today , hailing an intelligence coup that struck a blow at the organisation’s public relations apparatus. Reports of the arrest of Adam Gadahn in Karachi came on the same day the California-born American appeared in a web video in which he called on American Muslims to launch attacks in the US

Bomb and mortar attacks kill at least 19 in Iraqi capital as insurgents bid to derail second parliamentary election since 2003 A wave of bombings and mortar attacks have killed 19 people in Baghdad as insurgents bid to disrupt Iraq’s second general election since the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003. At least 12 people died in north-eastern Baghdad when an explosion leveled a building, and mortar attacks in western neighbourhoods of the capital killed seven people, police and hospital officials said. There were also explosions elsewhere in the country, but no reports of deaths