Events in Honduras, where the supposedly ‘hugely popular’ President Manuel Zelaya was ousted from power by the armed forces that were instructed to do so by the country’s Supreme Court which ruled that he was corrupt as hell, sent a shiver down the spines of certain leaders around the world. It is all very well for them to talk about democracy and the importance of having a system of checks and balances but it is completely another thing when this [...]

Pavel Korchagin writes: I am seriously considering leaving Britain and settling somewhere else. It is no longer a nice place to live in. It has changed in the last 15 years beyond all recognition. For the worse, that is. Where do I start? Well, first of all Britain is no longer value for money, like it was fifteen years ago when I came here. In those days you paid for what you got: good quality affordable goods that were still [...]

Martin McCauley writes from the United States: Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) was one of the greatest theorists of naval power. He conducted a cost benefit analysis of imperial expansion by integrating commercial, naval and political aspects. How does a nation expand its power at the lowest possible cost? He concluded that commerce was of paramount importance. War was to be a last resort, he stressed. In other words, the goal was expansion by stealth.There are two main schools [...]

Thomas Mathew writes: If the Labour government in Britain genuinely wanted to reform the House of Lords, like it has always claimed, it would have never contrived to use trickery to finesse everyone into believing that it had amended and, in effect, revoked every hereditary peer’s right (Letters Patent) to sit in the chamber by passing legislation known as the House of Lords Act 1999. An act of wilful vandalism and total folly.The master plan of Labour commissars was and [...]

Graham Rankin writes: Walk down the High Street and the choice of products seems overwhelming. Should you buy a Nokia, Sony-Ericsson, or a Motorola phone? An iPhone or a Palm Pre? Or what about an X-Box 360, a Wii, a Playstation, a PSP, a DSlite? Or a Sony Vaio laptop? Well, you might think it is a freedom of choice, except that all this stuff is made… by one company, Taiwanese giant Hon Hai, mostly in its factories in Shenzhen, [...]

Martin McCauley reports from the United States: The climate and energy bill scraped though the U.S. House of Representatives by 219 votes to 212 last Friday. The House has a Democrat majority. However, 44 Democrats voted against the bill and 8 Republicans voted in favour. Much was made on television of the length of the bill which runs to over 1,000 pages. How many of those who voted in favour actually read the whole text? My guess is that very [...]

Alex Nekrassov writes: There was no doubting of Michael Jackson’s global appeal and unrivalled ability to entertain at the peak of his career. And yet ,even in his prime, he was no Mozart and even no Elvis. I for one found his music karaoke-esque and the man himself odd and even weird at most times.Jackson was clearly a deeply disturbed man, especially over the last decade. His rapidly deteriorating health, due, as we are told now, to his addiction to [...]

Martin McCauley writes from the United States: Taiwan is of critical strategic importance to the People’s Republic of China. Geographically it blocks access to the western Pacific. Hence, the Middle Kingdom will do everything in its power to prevent the island becoming an independent state. Its great weakness at present is that the United States navy has the power to intervene if an armed conflict broke out between Beijing and Taipei.There is no way the Chinese navy, at present, could [...]

Martin McCauley writes: The Communist Party of China (CPC) has managed to avoid public unrest in Beijing and other cities on the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre on June 4. It was expecting some mark of dissent but none has materialised. However, all is not well in the provinces. Tension between Party and government officials and the police, on one side, and the local population, on the other, is approaching boiling point. The greatest threat to Party rule is [...]

Thomas Mathew writes: Should we be surprised by the announcement that the overpaid top executives of the publicly funded – I repeat, PUBLICLY FUNDED – British Broadcasting Corporation, that bastion of the loony left, spent licencepayers’ money on entertaining politicians and so-called celebrities? I am not at all surprised. It actually could not have been otherwise. Because, first of all, all loony left-wingers always treat public money is if it was their own. And, secondly, when they entertained all those [...]