Commitment. Dedication. Willingness. Devotion. Mission. There are millions of people who have no idea what that means. There are millions of people who don’t understand those things and don’t even want to. And unfortunately, there is quite a considerable amount of people who hate people with such qualities.
And then there’s this one man whose commitment, dedication, willingness, devotion and sense of mission have been…

Alexander Haig, the Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, and White House Chief of Staff under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, died today at the age of 85. He was one of my favourite old school politicians.
He was certainly a very interesting character. A general who had fought in Korea and Vietnam, received multiple military awards; a supreme allied commander in Europe; a politician that in this time brought some colour and excitement to Washington …

Miep Gies, the last surviving member of the group who helped Anne Frank and her family hide from the Nazis, died yesterday in the Netherlands at the age 100, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Gies and other employees of Anne’s father, Otto, smuggled food and books to the Franks as they hid with the van Daan family for two years, from 1942 to 1944, in a secret annex above Frank’s business premises in Amsterdam.
Anne’s diary, a log …

Member of Parliament George Galloway was deported from Egypt today, blocking his attempt to go to Gaza, Sky News reports.
Galloway told reporters that Egypt’s Foreign Ministry declared him “persona non grata”.
The incident began after Galloway and his colleague, Ron McKay, arrived at the Rafah crossing from Gaza to Egypt.
“As soon as they emerged on to Egyptian soil, both men were forcibly pushed into a van, refused exit and told that they were leaving the country,” …

A 14-year-old maths prodigy Arran Fernandez is set to become the youngest student at Cambridge University for more than two centuries.
Fernandez had already broken records with his GCSE results and glided through A-level maths and further maths. Now the child genius has received a conditional offer from Fitzwilliam College after he passed the university’s notoriously tough entrance exam last summer, the Daily Mail reports.
Assuming he cements his offer by passing A-levels physics, Arron will become …

The mystery surrounding the death of the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin, in an aircraft crash more than forty years ago may finally have been solved by a report which quashes decades of conspiracy theories and says that his death was caused by his panicked reaction after realising that an air vent in his cockpit was open.
Independent Russian investigators say they have uncovered crucial new evidence which finally reveals how the world’s first man …

Actor Charlie Sheen put a knife to his wife’s throat and threatened to kill her in a fight that began over Christmas, the BBC reports.
The star spent much of Christmas Day in a cell after he attacked Brooke Mueller Sheen when she asked him for a divorce.  Arrest papers quote Brooke Sheen saying that her husband straddled her on a bed and held her down.
The 44-year-old denied threatening his wife with a knife or choking …

Seven-times Formula One world champion Michael Schumacher said that his old hunger for racing is back in comments on returning to the royal motorsport and racing for Mercedes GP next year.
“I don’t want to deny at all that the idea of a German F1 team extremely tempts me. I guess every German driver would feel this way,” Schumacher said on his official website. “Of course it plays a major role that I again can work …

A Californian appeals court yesterday rejected rapist Roman Polanski’s bid to have his 1977 rape case dismissed.
His lawyers had pushed for the charge to be dropped on grounds of judicial misconduct.
Despite the dismissal, the California Second District Court of Appeal said they did not disregard the “extremely serious allegations” raised in the case, Sky News reports. The court urged the parties involved to “take steps to investigate and to respond to the claims” of misconduct.
Polanski …

Actress Brittany Murphy died yesterday at the young age of 32, Los Angeles County coroner’s official says it appears she died of natural causes, Fox News reports.
Murphy’s mother reportedly found the actress unconscious in the shower, and was in full cardiac arrest when paramedics arrived at the house.
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center Spokeswoman Sally Stewart said that the actress died at 10:04am on Sunday. Los Angeles Fire Department spokesman Devon Gale says crews …

Fears over the whereabouts of Lockerbie terrorist Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi have been put to rest after staff from East Renfrewshire Council were able to contact him today at his home in Tripoli, Sky News reports.
Local authority staff had been concerned after attempts to contact the terminally ill Libyan failed yesterday. There were also reports that mystery surrounded the bomber’s whereabouts after he could not be contacted either at his home or in hospital.
Criminal justice …

The Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Ben Bernanke, is this year’s Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
“The story of the year was a weak economy that could have been much, much weaker. Thank the man who runs the Federal Reserve, our mild-mannered economic overlord,” Time writes of Bernanke.
“The recession was the story of the year. Without Ben Bernanke … it would have been a lot worse,” Time’s managing editor Richard Stengel told Reuters. “We’ve…

Yegor Gaidar, the architect of Russia’s market reforms in the 1990s, has died aged 53, the BBC reports.
A spokesman for Gaidar said that he died of a blood clot.
Gaidar was Russia’s acting Prime Minister in 1992, launching the “shock therapy” reforms after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He is credited with carrying out the first wave of privatisations under President Boris Yeltsin.
His lifting of price controls was highly unpopular. The policies angered millions of …

Italy’s Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi will need weeks of treatment for the physical injuries and mental trauma suffered when he was assaulted by a mentally ill man in Milan on Sunday, The Times reports.
Berlusconi’s nose was broken and he lost two teeth and half a litre of blood in the attack, at the end of a political rally. He said it was a “miracle” he had not been blinded when a chunky souvenir made of …

US President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo today, but said that others may be “more deserving” of the award, the Daily Telegraph reports.
Obama also defended the US record in Afghanistan and his planned surge of 30,000 military personnel as motivated by his desire to bring peace to the war-torn country.
In his acceptance speech, he hit back at critics of his plan to begin withdrawing US soldiers from Afghanistan in mid-2011, saying …

A Los Angeles appeals court will consider today whether rapist Roman Polanski needs to appear in person to pursue his claim that his child rape case was tainted by judicial and prosecutorial misconduct and should be thrown out, AP reports.
The appeal began last summer when Polanski’s lawyers pressed to dismiss the case in California that has haunted the 76-year-old director since he fled to France three decades ago. Polanski himself is confined to house arrest …