Foreign policy analysts usually tend to explain Moscow's inflexible stance on Syria by evoking arms sales to Damascus (Bashar al-Assad's regime is said to have placed orders for Russian hardware to the tune of $3.5bn) and the Russian naval station in the Syrian port of Tartous. But this alone does not account for Russia's seeming indifference to the adverse effect that its international advocacy of the Assad government has on its relations with the United States, the European Union and the majority of the Arab states. The explanation has a lot to do with Russia's domestic policies and the obsessions of the Russian political class. By standing up for Damascus, the Kremlin is telling the world that neither the UN, nor any other body or group of countries has the right to decide who should or should not govern a sovereign state.

Ever since the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, but especially after the 2004 "Orange Revolution" in Ukraine, the Russian leadership has been obsessed with the idea of America and the EU engineering the overthrow of governments that, for whatever reason, they find unsuitable.

Ever since the Nato operation against former Yugoslavia in 1999, Moscow has deeply mistrusted Western humanitarian rhetoric and sees it as nothing but a camouflage for a policy of regime change.

EU partners have warned that no more bailout money will be handed to Greece, which is expected to run out of cash in weeks, unless it meets its budget and reform pledges. Tsipras says the EU is bluffing and that he wants to keep Greece in the euro."If one country leaves the euro, the euro zone collapses," he told Greek TV on Thursday. "If they don't give us the next loan installment, the euro zone will collapse the day after."

Analysts say it will be a Pyrrhic victory for whoever wins - Samaras will find it hard to govern for long with an empowered Tsipras protesting at the gates and Tsipras will realise he is inheriting a state on the verge of bankruptcy without bailout funds."It's possible that we will have a collapse no matter who is in government," said Yanis Varoufakis, a professor of economics at Athens University. "There is no easy solution."

In the early years of China's rise to economic and military prowess, the guiding principle for its government was Deng Xiaoping's maxim: "Hide Your Strength, Bide Your Time." Now, more than three decades after paramount leader Deng launched his reforms, that policy has seemingly lapsed or simply become unworkable as China's military muscle becomes too expansive to conceal and its ambitions too pressing to postpone.

The current row with Southeast Asian nations over territorial claims in the energy-rich South China Sea is a prime manifestation of this change, especially the standoff with the Philippines over Scarborough Shoal.

In what is widely interpreted as a counter to China's growing influence, the United States is pushing ahead with a muscular realignment of its forces towards the Asia-Pacific region, despite Washington's fatigue with wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Pentagon's steep budget cuts.And regional nations, including those with a history of adversarial or distant relations with the United States, are embracing Washington's so-called strategic pivot to Asia.

Guinea-Bissau soldiers took power on April 12, further undermining West Africa's fragile democracy gains.Guinea-Bissau has suffered turmoil from several coups and army uprisings since independence from Portugal in 1974, but the latest one has also set back western efforts to combat drugs cartels using the country as a transshipment point to Europe.

"The decision-making process by the prime minister was carried out without any orderly, coordinated, authorised and documented staff work," said the 158-page report of the May 2010 interception of the Mavi Marmara.

Lindenstrauss said Israeli discussions on stopping the Mavi Marmara was largely limited to one-on-one meetings that Netanyahu held with Defence Minister Ehud Barak and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.Israel's security cabinet, which the prime minister is obliged by law to consult before major military endeavours, convened only five days before the raid.Its members "were unaware of the purpose of the debate and did not have enough time to prepare for it", the report added.

A U.N. inquiry involving Israeli and Turkish representatives last September largely exonerated Israel's Gaza strategy and interception of the Mavi Marmara, though it faulted the navy for excessive force. Two previous internal Israeli probes, by the military and a government-named commission of inquiry, reported limited tactical and planning errors in the raid's execution.

Shcherban died in a hail of bullets as he stepped from a plane in the eastern city of Donetsk. The attackers, disguised as airport mechanics, also killed his wife and several bystanders.His killing followed several other murders in Donetsk, including a football stadium bombing that killed the owner of Shakhtar Donetsk club, and led to a realignment of political and business alliances in the key steel- and coal-producing region.Back then, both Tymoshenko and Yanukovich were big players in a turbulent region which seethed with intrigue and where fortunes were made and lost in murky dealings ranging from sales of state assets to protection rackets, extortion and theft.

Backing his president, Prime Minister Mykola Azarov said that after Shcherban had been removed, the company Tymoshenko headed, Unified Energy Systems of Ukraine, moved onto the scene and made big profits by selling Russian gas at a mark-up price to local companies.

Last month, general prosecutor Viktor Pshonka said Tymoshenko, 51, was being treated as a material witness in the Shcherban case and investigators were trawling through evidence in the case, including new testimony from the dead man's son.Ruslan Shcherban was 19 at the time and survived the attack by hiding under a car, but he has said recently he has evidence implicating Tymoshenko.

Human rights groups said the justice ministry decree amounted to a reintroduction of emergency law through the back door.

"Whenever the military is involved in arresting people, it then refers them to military tribunals, so this is basically a way of confirming the military's right to arrest and bring people before military tribunals," she said.

Amr Hamzawy, a liberal member of parliament, tweeted that the decision "reproduces the state of emergency law in a different form and threatens the rule of law."

A single regulator to oversee banks across all 27 European Union states could be in place as early as 2013 according to the European Commission. A controversial new bank bailout fund financed by a tax on financial institutions is also planned. The proposal includes an EU-wide deposit guarantee scheme to protect savers in the event of a bank collapse.

European banks are the biggest lenders to EU governments. The guarantee scheme would reduce banks' risk from lending to indebted governments such as Portugal. So indebted governments could benefit from artificially low borrowing costs by piggy-backing loan guarantees from Germany without addressing their underlying economic problems. For that reason, Sabine Lautenschlaeger insists that banking union should go hand-in-hand with fiscal union to ensure all EU governments adhere to strict budget policies. And that insistence could stall the whole banking union process.

Mr Barroso's plan would create a bank rescue fund from levies on financial institutions across the EU, effectively reducing company profits and shareholder dividends. This could also remove the possibility of one set of taxpayers, for example, in Germany, having to bail out savers in another country such as Spain.

a break-up of the euro may not in Germany's short-term interests.

Being in the euro helped Germany become more productive relative to its southern neighbors. If Germany still had a deutschmark, the discipline of its businesses would have been rewarded by a relative increase in its value, thereby limiting the disparity between Germany and other countries. Germany would not, therefore, have experienced to such a degree the low unemployment and healthy growth that its voters have gotten used to. In turn, this would have tempered the flow of German funds recycled southwards as investments in Greek, Spanish, and other assets, reducing the bubble pressure on Club Med asset prices.

Breaking up the euro, whether by Greece and Spain or by Germany, could at a stroke eliminate those productivity advantages and possibly stall the German economy. It could also instantly crystallize losses on assets held by German savers in Club Med bonds and loans, probably necessitating an immediate capitalization of the German banking system. In other words, the problems currently being experienced in the South would get transferred to the North.