"Pity poor Zimbabwe...." writes Byron King, referring to a story in the Times of London.

Campaigns run on money. Staff has to be paid, venues rented, ads bought, transportation gassed and ticketed. Most candidates for their party’s nomination don’t drop out as a direct consequence of losing one too many contests, they drop out because after they start losing, their campaign contributions drop off and they run out of money.

Before the debate was halfway complete, the blogosphere was erupting in outrage at the lack of questions about substantive issues.

Why do poor and lower middle class people keep voting for the party of the rich? Why don't they vote in their own best economic interests? It turns out that these questions have already been debated by some of the greatest minds in history. The French revolution of 1848 provided some answers.

Read between the lines of Hillary Clinton and her surrogates criticizing Barack Obama and his ‘bitter’ statement and that is one of the places her logic takes you. Hillary seems to be saying that Americans aren’t bitter because they have no reason to be.

John McCain will celebrate his 72nd birthday on August 29th, 2008, but several actuarial and medical data points suggest that he may be biologically in his eighties. At what point should McCain's frequent mental gaffes be considered symptoms of a physical and cognitive decline rendering him unfit for the pressures and responsibilities of the U.S. Presidency?

President George W. Bush did not get his will during the NATO summit in Bucurest. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has confirmed it will not yet offer membership to Georgia or Ukraine after the 26-member alliance was split amid strong objections from Russia.

As votes are 'counted' in the Zimbabwean elections, mass fraud on the part of the Mugabe government looks increasingly likely. If Mugabe wins, this devastated country will face another five years of his disastrous misrule. How will it cope?

As Nicholas Sarkozy visits the Prime Minister and the Queen in London, there is talk of the relationship between Britain and France becoming closer than it has ever been. But will the two leaders' very different personalities prove difficult to reconcile?

The disasters in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Darfur get plenty of press coverage - almost as much as the latest missing blond, white woman. But there is one humanitarian disaster that was directly caused by the Bush Administration that is almost completely ignored by the media - Somalia.

American politics has gone to far greater heights than ever this campaign: especially on Youtube we survey some of the heights of the campaign so far- with a crucial endorsement at the end!

Throw out all your ideas about divorce! They are all wrong and i think most of us know it deep down.

Ever since there have been notions of organised conflict, great thinkers have sought to justify mass slaughter, vindicating their compatriots and condemning their enemies. But what is 'Just War' all about these days? Can the term even still be applied accurately, or has it just become a convenient cover-all?

Pro-Democracy protests in and around Tibet have sparked running battles between protesters and Chinese security forces; but in the year that China is due to host the Olympics, is the rest of the world paying enough attention?

Barack Obama had to deliver a good speech today and prove he wasn't a racist: I think he succeeded.

Politicians can't get away with anything anymore - except killing people and destroying their nation's economies.

Here are ten British politicians from our era whose raison d'etre is to bore the pants off their audience. These guys have taken the art of sending us to sleep and turned it into the basis for a career. They demonstrate that the route to success in politics starts from being able to send your constituents to sleep- here are our names, do you agree?

It will soon be the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq by the 'Coalition of the Willing'. We ask what has been achieved.

It is Presidential Election time in Taiwan again. Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT) and Frank Hsieh of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) are squaring off on March 22 in another hard fought struggle for the future of the island.

As the new EU treaty is hotly debated in the House of Commons, calls for a public referendum in Britain are mounting. Fifteen years ago, we knew where we stood with Europe. These days, we're not so sure.

After effectively 9 years as president of Russia, Vladimir Putin's time in the top job has come to an end. Or has it...?

Europe is about to suffer an outbreak of Obamamania, just as we caught the epidemic of Kennedymania in 1961, when Camelot and the young President seized everyone’s imagination.

It is depressing that the American election has developed into charges and counter-charges of corruption. In the United States, the main problem of finance for politicians comes from the cost of elections. The 2008 Presidential election will end up costing $1 trillion, or perhaps more.

Americans never got the hang of empire. They send their centurions all over the world to provide stability and order, but they forget to charge for it. They do it at their own expense... which quickly becomes a losing proposition.

On February 17th, 2003, London introduced a camera-enforced congestion charging zone. Now, the motorist has to pay £8 (around $16) for driving through the centre of the city. As New York considers a similar scheme, we wonder if it's really been successful.

Fidel Castro has resigned from his position as Cuba’s unelected communist dictator. Good riddance.

In the middle of the night, Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader, announced that he would not accept the Cuban parliament's nomination for him to return as president, ending 18 months of uncertainty and almost 50 years of continuous rule.

The Republican primaries and caucuses have been decisive. Senator John McCain will be the Republican nominee in this November’s Presidential election. The Democratic nomination is not yet certain, but there is a strong probability that Senator Barack Obama has the momentum.

The smart money is going with Obama. That’s what the papers tell us. They say that the Clintons overplayed their hand… that by double-teaming Obama, they began to look like the evil side of a Worldwide Wrasslin’ match, slamming the underdog whenever the ref wasn’t looking.

A story in USA Today reports that “The U.S. population will soar to 438 million by 2050.” Most of the population growth will be driven by immigration and live births to immigrants. How depressing. And it ought to make you mad, so that you want to “do something” about it… like build a wall or something.