An opera about British terrorists planning an attack? Arifa Akbar asks the creators of 'Babur in London' how they negotiated a cultural minefield

The daring new opera featuring British terrorists planning an attack is being staged next month.

Angelina Jolie was greeted in Whitehall by the Foreign Secretary William Hague yesterday as she offered Hollywood backing to the Government's global campaign against sexual violence.

Is there a market for Saddam Hussein's autobiography? His eldest daughter Raghad thinks so. Now living in exile in Jordan, she's hawking the handwritten manuscript around publishers. Details of their contents or composition are unknown, but Raghad's lawyer, Haitham Nabil al-Harsh, told an Arab news channel: "These are the only real memoirs Saddam Hussein wrote by hand, and they will be released as soon as we find a publishing house."

A jailed activist who has been on a hunger strike since February made his first public appearance in months yesterday, attending a court hearing in a wheelchair.

A Shia Muslim man has pleaded not guilty to charges of insulting the Prophet Mohamed and the Sunni rulers of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain on Twitter.

Pakistan blocked the social networking website Twitter on Sunday because it refused to remove material considered offensive to Islam, said one of the country's top telecommunications officials.

Three bombs struck near simultaneously at a busy bird market in eastern Baghdad this morning, killing five people and wounding dozens, police and health officials said.

In the beginning, there was Bideford. In February 2012 the High Court ruled council meeting prayers in the Devon town unlawful, and reignited a row about encroaching secularisation that’s been rumbling in the background of British public life for over a century.

Prosecutors today were outlining their evidence of the alleged involvement of former Bosnian Serb military chief Gen. Ratko Mladic in Europe's worst mass murder since World War II, the 1995 Srebrenica massacre.

Iran spurned a previously undisclosed American offer from President George W Bush of talks aimed at reaching a "grand bargain" over long-standing differences between Washington and Tehran, a leading figure in the country's theocratic regime has revealed.

A red-faced Pentagon has conceded that an instructor at its Joint Forces College in Virginia for military officers was until recently teaching a course advocating “total war” with Islam that could require obliterating the holy cities of Mecca and Medina without concern for civilian deaths. 

The widow of one of the London suicide bombers was financing a terrorist attack in Kenya, it has been claimed.

A grenade explosion has killed two people and wounded at least 30 others outside a crowded bar in the southern Philippines.