Notorious mass murderer Ebrahim Raisi was running scared at the UN last week. As leader of the world’s foremost pariah regime, this truly evil man had plenty of time on his hands in New York, with few heads of state willing to engage with him.

As we pass another 9/11 anniversary, people talk about Daesh as if they were a defeated, spent force. In fact, they are a more globalized movement than at any time in their history.

When your bridegroom boasts that he has been cheating on you all the way up to the night before the wedding, there are grounds for giving the forthcoming marriage second thoughts.

The healthiest diplomatic relationships are essentially transactional in nature. Just as NATO requires intimate coordination between America and the Europeans, there are deep-seated reasons why, since the foundation of the modern Gulf states, they and the US have been the closest of allies.

It turns out Iran’s intelligence services aren’t so intelligent after all. After a series of mortifying failures, Hossein Taeb — Iran’s “untouchable” spy chief, with close ties to the supreme leader — has been summarily thrown overboard.

Having lost the support of much of his own Conservative Party and narrowly survived a no-confidence vote, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is now going all-out to appease his right-wing support base in the cause of his own political survival.

The Iran-backed Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi paramilitary movement has adopted a “divide-and-conquer strategy” in its efforts to dominate Iraq’s ethnically diverse Nineveh province.