(This article has been provided by a leading expert on international affairs.)The funfair or the circus is where you would expect to see a camel and a dragon measuring up to one another. However, there is a new version of this encounter: Dubai is the camel and China is the dragon. They are now embracing and getting along just fine. The recent visit of the ruler of Dubai to China was a landmark. Not only did he get to meet [...]

It was an accident. Honest. I switched on the TV at 10 o’clock in the evening to watch the news on BBC1 but somehow ended up on BBC2, and suddenly the hysterical intro started playing and it turned out to be the current affairs ‘quizshow’ Have I Got News For You hosted by, of all people, Julian Clary. I’ve stopped watching HIGNY a long time ago. I thought then, and still think now, that it is biased towards Labour and that [...]

Now that it has been revealed by Lord Levy in his memoirs that former prime minister Tony ‘five times a night’ Blair knew all the Labour lenders and donors and personally decided which ones should receive peerages I would like to ask this: is the police going to question him again and bring charges against him for lying during the previous investigation into the peers for peerages scandal? Because now that Lord Levy’s book is out, the book should be [...]

The British Office of Fair Trading (OFT) has accused eleven big retailers and two tobacco companies of conspiring to fix prices on cigarettes. Big supermarket chains like Asda, Sainsbury’s and Tesco, along with Imperial Tobacco and Gallagher, stand accused of price fixing. The OFT is saying that these companies have been colluding in raising prices on popular brands of cigarettes and exchanging information about the rate of price increases and the timing. Huge fines are looming on the horizon for [...]

Dan Majestic writes: I’ll be honest, I didn’t really plan to mention the 22nd anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I thought that most people have already forgotten about it and the ones who still remember don’t really want to be reminded of it. I noticed that hardly any coverage in the press and in the TV news bulletins in the West had been devoted to the biggest catastrophe in the nuclear power industry in history. I also reckoned that [...]

So now we know: the reason why Israeli warplanes flew into Syria’s airspace in September of last year and bombed an instillation on the banks of the Euphrates River was to destroy a nuclear reactor which had been built there using North Korean technology. At least that’s what the CIA Director Mike Hayden reported to Congress recently and produced photographs of the instillation in question, before and after the bombing. He insisted that the design of the ‘nuclear plant’ in [...]

The Kremlin is at it again: talking tough to the world and issuing threats without really meaning it. Russia knows that it’s not going to do anything, the West knows it, Russia knows that the West knows it, and the West knows that Russia knows that it knows it. And only the poor Russian people are being once again fooled into thinking that their leaders – because there are two presidents now, you see – are prepared to do whatever [...]

Dear Sir, I have been buying The Big Issue for quite some time now but it is only recently that I actually started reading it. Yes, not just buying for the sake of helping out the people who were selling the magazine on the streets but also having a glance through and reading some of the articles. To get an idea of what your magazine is about, that is. Because you have been on the scene for many years now [...]

I have recently promised British Petroleum in my article posted on this website (See item ‘It’s An Old Russian Custom: Keep Your Business Partner Guessing’, March 27 in section ‘Russian Graffiti’) that I would ask my sources in Moscow to investigate rumours that the state owned gas giant, Gazprom, is planning to buy a 50 per cent stake in the joint venture BP-TNK. Well, I can report today that, unfortunately for BP, these rumours have proven to be correct. Yes, [...]

So what was so great about the first leg semi-final matches of the European Championship between Liverpool and Chelsea and Barcelona and Manchester United? Where was all that excitement and tension that we’ve been promised during the build up? Considering that these are top European teams with some of the highest paid players in the world the spectacle in both cases was, quite frankly, pathetic. Let’s look at the first semi-final match at Anfield with its 1:1 result. To listen [...]