Graeme Mackay

Tunisia has its fourth PM in three years: a sign that it is still in need of greater stability.

Shinzō Abe visit to Yasukuni Shrine can only worsen relationships with China but exonerating war criminals highlight Shōwa Emperor's responsibility

On 29 November 2013 a Police Scotland helicopter came down and crashed through the roof of the popular and crowded Clutha Bar. At the time, there were about 120 people in The Clutha and the accident left nine people dead and 32 injured - 14 seriously.

The Third Plenary session of the 18th Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Congress commenced in Beijing on 9 November 2013 and concluded on 12 November.

Petroplus Holdings AG (Switzerland) was, not so long ago, Europe's largest independent refiner. In January 2012, the company defaulted on its senior notes and filed for bankruptcy. In the UK, its centre of operations was the Coryton Refinery in Essex which it had bought from BP in 2007 and which was able to handle tankers up to 250,000 deadweight tons (dwt). The refinery had a capacity of 11 million tonnes per year and had been running at about 88 per cent capacity shortly before its demis...

On 04 October 2013, the man some refer to as Vietnam's "Red Napoleon", Senior General Vo Nguyen Giap, died at the Central Military Hospital in Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, at the age of 102. General Giap's grand state funeral came to a finale on 13 October and definitely marks that oft used phrase "the end of an era", not least because the General managed to outlive his contemporaries in power, civil and military, friend and foe alike.

What, or rather who, is the link between the small town of Muscatine, Iowa, and Zhengding County, Hebei, China?

All-important question of where the blame lies has not been answered, says Graeme Mackay

Contrast between Tunisian Revolution and what has happened in Egypt, Lybia and Syria could not be more stark.

On 18 August 2013, General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi appeared on Egyptian state television calling the unrest, verging on civil war, which the world has been witnessing since the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohammed Morsi on 03 July, "terrorism"

Another Bastille Day (14 July) over and this year's pride of place in the military march past went to detachments of the French, Malian and other West African Army forces which had saved Mali from imploding and falling into the hands of Islamic extremists in January 2013. Troops from 13 African nations that had supported France's Opération Serval in Mali, participated in the parade. The United Nations soldiers in their blue berets were led by Mali's Colonel Elisée Jean Dao. The countr...

Coup leaders apologizing for the consequences of their actions is not something that happens very often. In Bamako, the capital of Mali however, a rare example of it took place on 26 June 2013 when Captain Amadou Aya Sanogo did just that in front of an audience which included Interim President Dioncounda Traoré, recently reconciled factions of the Mali Army, religious and tribal leaders and the media.

Every year, usually in late autumn, The Economist publishes its "The World in____" for the following year. The issue for 2012 has an article by Oliver August on the effects of the North African uprisings of 2011 spreading south and in particular, foresees trouble brewing for the Sahel states because of the fall of Muammar Gaddafi:

On 26 January 2013, French forces liberated the city of Gao in Mali after it had endured a 10-month-long occupation by Islamic extremists calling themselves the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) and its close ally, Ansar Dine. MUJAO was established as recently as mid-2011 as a Black African offshoot of Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) because its fighters thought the parent organisation "too Algeria" focused. In Mali, where the population for the most part pract...

When it comes to the two Koreas even table tennis is a political battleground, says Graeme Mackay.

On 25 April 2013 the French Ministry of Labour posted the latest unemployment figures for March - an increase of 36,900 and the 23rd consecutive monthly increase - which showed that 3.224 million were signed up and looking for work. The Ministry admitted that this figure broke the previous record set in 1997 of 3.195 million and whilst not releasing an unemployment rate, reiterated that this had stood at 10.2 per cent at the beginning of the year and that they are confidant that the rate would ...

I was leaving Singapore which had been "home" for the previous 10 months and had asked the teller at the Hong Kong Shanghai Bank on Collyer Quay for the balance of my account in the form of a sterling draft. A little surprised, I was told that a manager would see me shortly and I was duly ushered into a rather plush interview room wondering what could possibly be amiss. My account was worth £360 in sterling which, using the retail price index, equates to £2,400 in 2013, so hardly a fortu...

It is most difficult to judge the true measure of the threat currently posed by North Korea in its war of words plus limited action, with South Korea, Japan and the United States. Both sides having their fingers on the triggers, US Secretary of State John Kerry was in China, the North's only real major ally, on 13 April 2013 speaking to Chinese leaders including President Xi Jinping and top diplomat Yang Jiechi. All professed determination to resolve the tense situation caused by the ever s...

On 22 March 2013, two days after Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne delivered his 2013 Budget Address to the House of Commons, Fitch Ratings agency placed the UK's "AAA" Long-term Issuer Default Ratings (IDR) on Rating Watch Negative (RWN). The agency stated that it was more than likely that by the end of April 2013, by which time the agency will have made a full review of the UK's sovereign ratings, it is more than likely that the UK will be downgraded.

As French troops and their allies start their tenth week fighting against Muslim militants and terrorists in Northern Mali, opinion in one of the world's poorer countries remains firmly in favour of the intervention by France, the old colonial power, in the country's struggle against the extremists which so nearly brought down the country's government. If the fundamentalists had reached Bamako, the capital, it is more than likely that the victorious Islamists would have imposed the str...

Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), a terrorist group which is financed through its criminal activities of smuggling, drug trafficking and kidnapping for ransom, carried out two separate bombings on 11 April 2007 in the Algerian capital, Algiers. Active members vary between 300 and 800 for this Salafist group which formally changed its name from Group for Call (that is Preaching) and Combat (GSPC in its French form) only in January 2007. Itself a splinter organisation with a history of lea...

On 16 December 2012 with voter turnout at just over 59 per cent, the lowest since the Second World War, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party trounced Yoshihiko Noda's Democratic Party of Japan to win the most seats in the House of Representatives, the Lower House in the National Diet, and so return to their usual dominance as Japan's ruling party - and probably a dominance more conservative than ever under the strongly right-wing Shinzo Abe!

All things considered, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Liberal Democrat Deputy Nick Clegg, have established a close working relationship over the past two-and-a-half years of Coalition Government.

George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, has often of late made reference to the fact that the Coalition Government has already reduced the country's Budget Deficit by a quarter since coming to power. Concentrating on Deficit reduction has not been politically comfortable for the Government with the opposition Labour Party being usually ahead in the opinion polls since late November 2010 - it didn't take long - and a ComRes survey for The Independent at the end of October...

"We are not making reforms because I want to. We are merely responding to the people's desire for reform. Therefore my future depends on the people and their wishes."

On 06 November 2012, after electoral campaigns costing some $5.8 billion (and feeling like they had continued from the 2010 Midterms) President Obama convinced enough voters to give him "the benefit of the doubt" and re-elect him for a second term in the White House. On 09 November in his first address after securing victory, the President threw down a gauntlet to his Republican opponents in Congress over his proposal to increase taxes on the rich in order to avert the dire consequences ...

On 17 October 2012 Britain's Prime Minister, David Cameron announced in the House of Commons that: "...we will be legislating so that energy companies have to give the lowest tariff to their customers..."

Seldom today does one hear of a person being charged with lese-majeste, yet 43-year-old Wang Zia Chao a Chinese garment factory supervisor was found guilty of this crime on Tuesday, 23 October 2012 by a judge in Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. Her crime was "...intentionally damaging the photos..." of recently deceased former King Norodom Sihanouk who abdicated in favour of one of his sons in 2004 and died in Beijing, aged 89, on 15 October. The former King's body was flown back ...

Early in November, the world's first and third largest nations by population have elections. On Tuesday, 06 November 2012, the third country by population (314.5 million) with the largest capitalist economy but also the one with the greatest debt, the United States, will elect a new President Romney or re-elect President Obama for a second term. Leaving aside what wonderful husbands both men apparently are and their equally wonderful, devoted wives and families who at times in the campaign a...