If Muhammad won't come to the mountain, the mountain must come to Muhammad. Or so goes a saying popularised by Francis Bacon. It seems Andrew Mitchell, the Development Secretary, has taken this to heart and decided to move his entire Department — DfID — closer to the Foreign Office, MoD and, of course, No 10. After years of relishing its location — both geographically and fu...

It’s a day for growth initiatives. In addition to those described earlier, George Osborne has announced that Whitehall’s annual underspend will be reinvested into capital spending projects. The emphasis on infrastructure echoes Danny Alexander’s statements during the Lib Dem conference, when the Treasury secretary disclosed that existing programmes would be brought forward and fu...

Sea trials for the new Chinese aircraft carrier have been delayed. "As this is our first aircraft carrier, it's not abnormal that the vessel encounters certain problems. That's why we have never formally announced any timetable for its trial navigation," an unidentified Chinese military official told the paper. He added that the problems the vessel were not serious and will not affect fu...

Wen Jibao’s performance at today’s press conference was typically diplomatic. He declined to say that the UK was going too far in Libya and was emollient on the question of human rights. But his honeyed words can’t obscure the true nature of the Chinese regime. But Wen Jibao’s presence here was also a reminder that the economic competition Britain is going to face in the fu...

President Obama may be having a hissy fit over Israel's borders, but a major foreign policy crisis is brewing over a Muslim Arab nation's aggression to forcibly settle a border dispute that was to be decided peacefully by referendum. Last January 9, the mainly black African, Christian and animist southern Sudan voted successfully to separate from the North and is scheduled to become a fu...

First up, Woman on a Raft summarises the precise legal basis for the police's action - or, more specifically, the complete absence of any basis. So, a citizen was deprived of his liberty without the ghost of the shadow of the memory of a legal basis, and dear old Shami and the rest of the usual suspects on the left have either suddenly remembered an urgent dental appointment or they're actually te...

Following James’ post, here’s a video of a purported Shaolin monk getting knocked out by an American in some kind of US/PRC smackdown in Las Vegas, much to the dismay of the mainly Chinese crowd. You could chart this according...

The Shaolin temple is looking to expand its business overseas. Problem here is that there's no trademark on "Shaolin," and a fair number of martial arts places abroad already use the name, so the brand is thoroughly diluted. In China,...

Richard North notes that Ambrose has a splendidly angry piece about Ireland's debt servitude. Stripped to its essentials, the €85bn package imposed on Ireland by the Eurogroup and the European Central Bank is a bail-out for improvident British, German, Dutch, and Belgian bankers and creditors. The Irish taxpayers carry the full burden, and deplete what remains of their reserve pension fu...

Thinking about it, my main problem with the FU Budget was it's essentially fraudulent nature. The Comprehensive Spending Review turned out to be not very comprehensive after all. While the guy in the street got hammered, the CSR tacitly accepted every absurd premise Nu Lab had ever advanced to justify their vision of elephantine government as a natural feature of modern life. What better example o...