I'm back! With a filthy cold, but newly cleansed ears, having had a doctor with a little machine suck out great gobbets of Beijing ear-shit yesterday. The world is a surprisingly noisy place. Should any of you have missed me...

Telling Germans to work less, to borrow more, and to produce shoddy cars and machine tools is not the answer, writes Philip Stephens

Haniyeh said during the graduation ceremony of the first class of police academy in Gaza article: ‘The institutions set up security on a national basis should remain a working incubator for any security in the future.’ Haniyeh said: ‘What we have built will not destroy, because the Palestinian people felt fruit construction, particularly by ending

Lets be frank, up till now Alex Salmond has had the run of the public subsiy theme park that is Scottish politics. There's no serrious chanlanger in his own party or any of the other Scottish branches of supposed Unionist parties. But now the Westminster machine has opened one weary eye and focused on him. It may be that SNP strategists had the opening moves worked out and counter moves antic...

It's not a machine, model or mechanism. It's a game of Calvinball.

The mighty American military machine that has for so long secured the country's status as the world's only superpower will have to be drastically reduced, Barack Obama warned yesterday as he set out a radical but more modest new set of priorities for the Pentagon over the next decade.

Staff are trying to update the modern machine they created in 2008 which broke new ground on numerous fronts, raising huge amounts of money through the internet

Excellent backgrounder at China Beat on the forcthcoming Taiwanese elections, a matter of some interest in Beijing and Washington as well as to the directly affected parties. The writer thinks that Ma and the Kuomintang will shade it, helped by...

Don’t expect the euphoria over a new Italian government to last long. There is no need to share it. The markets  enjoyed a relief rally on news of a new government forming in Italy. The European establishment is behind Mr Monti, so we should expect the ECB and the spin machine to try to engineer

In my latest at WPR I take a middle road between McGrath and Galrahn on ASB: And of course, both sides have to prepare for war, both to improve their negotiating positions and in case negotiations fail. China’s military might is now sufficient that the United States cannot leave room for the kind of error that inter-service conflict normally produces; its military machine has to run as effic...