Owen Matthews

The village clubhouse at Nikolina Gora, a well-heeled dacha village just outside Moscow, is usually a delightfully sedate place. Local residents Mstislav Rostropovich and Sergei Prokofiev used to give recitals for their neighbours on the clubhouse terrace. On Sunday afternoons lesser musicians still keep up the tradition and the strains of Mozart drift through the pines. Hardly an appropriate venue, one would think, then, for a hostile takeover bid by corporate raiders — but at last month’s annual residents’ meeting tempers were running high as the village’s elected committee decided how to face just such a raid. Nikolina Gora’s troubles offer a nasty insight into the way business is done in Russia.

Baghdad Just because you’re not paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you, and someone’s definitely out to get us. Last week the Palestine hotel, home to many journalists here, was almost demolished by a particularly telegenic truck bomb. The neat mushroom cloud rose a thousand feet into the sky, shedding a geometrically near-perfect ring of falling debris about halfway up. It was terribly beautiful. Our security minders tell us that the attack was a sign that all journalists in the city are now fair game. Some of us have reacted by going into lockdown mode, retreating behind the walls of the world’s greatest fortress, Baghdad’s Green Zone, guarded by Georgian troops in American uniforms and Gurkha mercenaries hired by Global Security.

Owen Matthews goes on patrol with American soldiers in Afghanistan’s ‘Indian Country’ and sees them capture and interrogate suspects It was one of those wonderfully luminous Afghan days, the spring sky a vibrant baby-blue, the heat of the day cut by a breeze which blew though fields of poppies and winter barley. We were on the edge of the Khost highlands, where the fertile Khost plain starts to rise into the mountains of the Pakistani border — also known, not so affectionately, by the soldiers of Task Force One of the US army’s 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment as ‘Indian Country’. Band-i-Khel, the small village we had surrounded with our armoured cars and Humvees seemed deserted.

If there is any justice in the world, Captain Duane Haddock of US special forces is due a medal. He was, we can reveal, the first coalition soldier to find something approaching concrete evidence of Saddam's evil arsenal of weapons of mass destruction; to wit, a trailer believed to be a mobile bio-weapons laboratory found parked by a roadblock south of Mosul.

Istanbul I have no doubt that Allah moves in mysterious ways. But if He has chosen Recep Tayyip Erdogan as the instrument of His vengeance on the infidel, He must be given credit for startling originality. Erdogan, whose party won a landslide victory in Turkey's recent general election, may be feared in some quarters as a dangerous Islamist, in person he looks no more threatening than a rather blokeish bank manager. Even during his most animated moments on the campaign trail, his bearing was that of the trainer of a small-town football club rather than the Ayatollah Khomeini. One wonders what the fuss is about - Erdogan, with his clipped moustache and nondescript suit, evokes less the Nation of Islam than the Abbey National of Islam.