The sun and the States remain the traditional hotspots for Irish holidaymakers, but an increasing number of thrillseekers are looking to emerging democracies such as Libya for a trip with an edge.

The UN’s top human rights official has urged nations to save Syria’s embattled and dying children and to rally behind a 14-year-old girl shot in the head by the Taliban for promoting female education.

The supreme leader of the Palestinian Islamic militant group Hamas is to step down, clearing the way for the movement to choose a new head for the first time in more than 15 years, senior officials said.

Fury over an anti-Islam film spread across the Muslim world, with deadly clashes near Western embassies in Tunisia and Sudan, an American fast-food restaurant set ablaze in Lebanon, and international peacekeepers attacked in the Sinai despite an appeal for calm from Egypt’s president.

The Pope has arrived in Lebanon to urge peace at a time of great turmoil in the Middle East.

Mortars rained down on a crowded marketplace in a Palestinian refugee camp in the Syrian capital, killing 21 people as regime forces and rebels clashed on the southern outskirts of Damascus, activists have said.

Former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was last night declared “clinically dead” by his doctors after suffering a stroke and cardiac arrest, the state news agency MENA said.

AT a coffee house, on a desert road, an ancient trade route where caravans once carried spices and silks from distant lands to Petra, I smoked my first hookah.

A coalition of more than 70 partners, including the United States, has pledged to send millions of dollars and communications equipment to Syria’s opposition groups.

Spanish photographer Samuel Aranda won the 2011 World Press Photo of the Year award yesterday for an image of a woman holding a wounded relative after a demonstration in Yemen.

THE Russian protest movement yesterday vowed there would be new demonstrations this week after a leading anti-Kremlin activist was given a fresh jail sentence following the latest mass rally against Vladimir Putin.

British travel agent Thomas Cook today said it will close 200 stores over the next two years as it battles to turn around its ailing UK business.

Moroccans are choosing a new parliament today in Arab Spring-inspired elections that are facing a boycott by democracy campaigners who say the ruling monarchy is not committed to real change.

From child porn to the theft of copyrighted material, there is a need for regulation in cyberspace. But how can it be achieved, asks Diarmaid Condon.

THE moderate Islamist party that appears to have won Tunisia’s elections was in talks with rivals yesterday about forming an interim coalition government to lead the birthplace of the Arab Spring through its transition to democracy.

LESS than two weeks ago America and its friends — including Ireland — marked the tenth anniversary of the worst terrorist attack that country has faced.