It’s hard to judge how serious the confrontation over Iraq between George Bush and the Democrats in the US Congress is.
The first round of the French presidential elections last Sunday was haunted by its counterpart five years ago.
No one could miss the symbolism of the suicide bomb that went off inside the Iraqi parliament building in Baghdad on Friday of last week. There is nowhere, even in the heart of the Green Zone, that is safe from the resistance.
Profits are, of course, what capitalism is all about. The ultimate measure of success for any firm is the rate of profit – that is, its profits compared to the capital it invested to obtain them.
The official view of the world economy put forward, for example, by the International Monetary Fund, is that everything is going splendidly, despite the sharp falls in global share prices last May and at the end of February this year.
Tony Blair is spending what is meant to be the twilight of his premiership rushing around in a frenzy of policy initiatives meant to define his famous "legacy". The decision to update the Trident submarine-launched nuclear missiles is apparently part of this.
The Channel 4 fantasy programme The Trial of Tony Blair had the next general election culminate in a photo finish between a tongue-tied, terminally indecisive Gordon Brown and a vacuously trendy David Cameron.
A decade ago Zbigniew Brzezinski, one of the US’s leading strategic thinkers, published a book called The Grand Chessboard.
From being a fringe issue climate change has apparently become completely mainstream. News bulletins are incomplete without a report on some new sign of global warming.
It's hard not to look forward to the French presidential elections, whose first round is only two and half months away, with a sense of foreboding.
George Bush’s method when deciding his new Iraq strategy seems to have been to take the report of the Iraq Study Group (ISG) and, where it said minus, replace with a plus.
The state of the radical left in Europe is quite contradictory. If one just looked at the visible state of political organisation in some countries one could get quite depressed.
