Somalia is an example of how, after a decade of ground combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Obama administration is trying to achieve US military goals with minimal risk of American deaths.

The United States is showering economic benefits and military goodies on Israel, in addition to the billions of dollars in aid it hands over every year. And Europe is not far behind.

Close to 200 Critical Mass cyclists were arrested protesting over the elite Olympics lanes, to be used only by VIPs moving effortlessly between Park Lane hotels and the games venues.

Why does the US -- which trails many poorer nations in education, health, security, etc -- pay such huge sums to create a global presence of representatives with guns.

Like Japan’s hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties, the drone killing of nameless, unarmed, undefended human beings is a warning to the world: “Don’t mess with us; we run things now.”

Obama's embrace of Bush/Cheney terrorism and civil liberties policies — is doing more to entrench those once-controversial policies than Bush and Cheney ever dreamt of doing.

Syrians should hope and pray they are lucky, like Iraq, to have an occupying military force — America — that "everyone on the ground" trusts to "manage the transition."

No BBC journalist has so much as drawn a connection between the British occupation of Afghanistan and the installation of such a high level of security for the Olympics.

The Kazakh dictator Nazarbayev apparently paid Blair $13m to eulogise his odious regime in a state video and applaud him for "subtlety and ingenuity … in a region fraught with difficulties".

UK personnel controlled armed drones in Libya last year – despite the repeated government insistence that the UK has only ever operated armed drones in Afghanistan.