On Tuesday I said that if he is going to be re-elected as Mayor of London on 3 May, Boris Johnson cannot afford for 68 per cent of voters in the inner boroughs to support Ken Livingstone. He needs to court those people vigorously, and explain that he has delivered a better city for them. How should he do that?

For more than 60 years, Manuel Fraga was a giant of Spanish politics who started out as a high-profile figure in the second period of Franco's regime and then made an opportunistic transformation in the post-Franco political arena.

It is unfortunate that the issue of prisoners' votes has been used as a springboard for attack

It's been a dreadful week for free speech. A meeting at a prestigious London college had to be abandoned on Monday evening when members of the audience were filmed and threatened by an Islamic extremist. Then the president of a student society at another London college was forced to resign after a Muslim organisation called for a ban on a joky image of the Prophet Mohammed. Finally, on Friday, the author Sir Salman Rushdie cancelled an appearance at India's largest literary festival, saying he feared an assassination attempt after protests by Muslim clerics.

Ecstatic cheers of "Long live Aung San Suu Kyi!" echoed through the streets of Rangoon yesterday as Burma's most famous citizen registered her candidacy for a parliamentary by-election. Throngs of flag-waving supporters crowded the local election office to shout support and catch a glimpse of the 66-year-old Nobel peace laureate, who spent years under house arrest.

ENRC, the mining giant at the centre of corporate governance storms, has agreed to hand over details of an internal investigation into its activities to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO).

Taiwan's ruling party has claimed victory in the island's presidential election.

David Cameron arrived for talks in Saudi Arabia today as an influential group of MPs raised questions over British arms deals with the country.

Burma freed some of its most famous political inmates today, sparking jubilation outside prison gates while signalling its readiness to comply with demands from the US and its allies for a lifting of economic sanctions.

Burma's opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi has confirmed she will run for a parliamentary seat in April by-elections.

Driven by a theology that refuses to grant women equal rights, ultraorthodox Jews have begun to flex their misogynist muscles. But, says Catrina Stewart, a fightback has begun

Sir Robert Horton had a forceful, dynamic management style which in 1990 propelled him to the top of British Petroleum, then the world's third-largest oil company. It was assumed he would develop into a titan of the industry. But his trademark vigour was accompanied by another trademark, that of imperious arrogance, which despite his undoubted talents led to his removal as chairman and chief executive within two years.

I'm off to the Congo for two weeks. I'm still travelling the world looking for reputed monsters to put in my new book, Scary Monsters and Super Creeps. This time I'm going after the mokele mbembe, a dinosaur-type creature that is supposed to inhabit Lake Tele in the far north of "good" Congo.

The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi once asked: Given the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, why haven't they made contact? "They are already among us," came the reply, "but they call themselves Hungarians."