Marwa As’ad, a Turkoman resident of Kirkuk, is heartbroken. She had been planning to marry a local Kurdish man but her family broke off the engagement after her brother was carjacked by a Kurd. She believes rising tensions among different ethnic and religious groups in Kirkuk contributed to her break-up.

 We asked for comments from the Pakistani journalist and writer Ahmed Rashid, who lives in Lahore

 The law that denies Israeli citizenship to mixed couples is once again the subject of discussion

 Torrential rains are making the situation in the Saharawi refugee camps worse

 In India tens of thousands of people are forced out of their homes and villages

 Berlusconi defends Putin’s war in Chechnya. Unfortunately our premier is not Putin’s only ‘defense attorney’: until now, none of the heads of state in European governments, and western governments in general, have ever had the courage to denounce the Chechen horror and the responsibilities of the Russian president