With the last combat troops withdrawing from Iraq the US military must soon look for a new project to keep itself occupied.

The USA spends almost as much money on its military than every other nation on earth combined.

That is a frightening statistics in anyone’s book and one that makes the military machine the biggest lobbying influence in American politics. US spending in real term dollars has doubled since 2000 and now stands at nearly $900 billion.

Being a bull in northern Spain is about to become a lot safer after the Catalonian government voted to bring to an end centuries of tradition and ban bullfighting.

Animal lovers may be celebrating, but in truth, like so many political decisions in this part of Spain, it has more to do with the Catalans taking another step towards independence from the rest of the country rather than any feelings of sympathy for the plight of the bull.

For it still has cross society support over much of the central and southern parts of the country where would be recruits continue to queue up to risk ‘Death in the Afternoon’. Here the taking part, the risking of life and limb, is still seen as the ultimate expression of being a man amongst men in a society where ‘machismo’ matters.

Although undoubtedly cruel, from the first drawing of blood the rules state the matador has up to 15 minutes to finally dispatch the bull, for many millions of Spaniards it is part of the very fabric of Spain.

Already in the capital, a petition calling for a vote against a ban there, has collected more than 50,000 signatures of support and Madrid’s regional government has declared the corrida, or bullfight protected as being integral to the city’s cultural heritage.

So, if animal welfare activists really do think they have turned acorner they should think again. Remember this is the same country that on January 23 every year in the town of Manganeses de la Polvorosa, Zamora, locals respect a time honoured tradition. They throw a goat from the top of the local Church tower – alive.

The Royal and Ancient need to start making some hard decisions if golf is to continue to flourish in the coming years.

With the world’s leading players ripping apart the Old Course last week, despite some of the worst weather at The Open for a decade, the game’s masters either have to consider some serious rule changes to the way the game is played, particularly around the type of equipment that is being used or they need to think about scrapping some of the traditional links courses such as St Andrews as Open hosts. The scores are saying they’re just no longer a true test to the world’s best players.

The island of Eigg is suffering a power cut. An inconvenience most might think. But not when it could be permanent.

Just six months after it won countless awards for being the first community in the UK to become totally reliant on green energy, it’s running out.

Renewable energy, point out the sceptics is not quite as renewable as the green lobby make out to be.

The water that the islands 95 inhabitants rely on to drive their mini hydro plant to boil their kettles and light their homes is running out thanks to the recent prolonged warm spell. The islanders who were given a £300,000 grant for their efforts have now switched back on their diesel generators. The combined wind and sun power plants are not enough to make up the shortfall.

Now sceptics may be gloating, but this mini crisis on one Scotland’s smallest inhabited islands proves a very serious point for the rest of the country.

The current government has made a huge play on the renewable energy card backing its development to the tune of millions. And rightly so Scotland has potentially some of the best renewable source in Europe. But the key word here is potentially, no one in the industry knows for sure how much of this potential can be realised and exploited and indeed if it will be enough to service the energy needs of the whole country.

Eigg could be seen as a microcosm of the whole country if it too becomes wholly reliant on renewable energy.

The islanders thought they were self reliant in energy and when the scheme launched they were.

But weather is fickle and now they are running short. But luckily they have diesel generators for back up. If a whole country reliant on renewable ran out they wouldn’t have the option. They’d need to import energy from abroad.

Now surely this would be irresponsible government at its worst. Is ensuring security of energy supply not fundamental to the government’s duty to the people it serves? To risk it is putting the very economy and well being of the country at risk.

That is why as well as investing in the most innovative renewable technology the Scottish government has to look again at have having its own diesel generator back up in the form of nuclear with the consistency and security of supply on tap that no other form of energy can offer.

If the whole country runs out of power thanks to an overreliance on green energy governments present and future be could be left with more than Eigg on their face.

Mark Zuckerberg, boss of Facebook has been cornered into making a half hearted apology to users after mounting anger at changes to the social networking site's privacy policy.

The growing trend for sharing more and more of users’ private information with third parties may mean the second most popular website in the world after Google has reached its high watermark.

Previous fans of the site are switching off their accounts in droves after charges that the company is continuing to to erode its privacy policy. Facebook now wants to share information about users with partners like Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft. This should hardly come as a surprise to users, although maybe it does to those gullible enough to think they are Zuckerburg’s customers.

Members or users are not his customers; users are simply a list of people he has information about. Information he can use to make money from Facebook’s true customers, advertisers.

For without advertising revenue Facebook is worth zero. The way the business model is designed the more Facebook can segment information about users the more attractive these user lists become, and correspondingly the more expensive they become.

Put simply the more Facebook knows about its users the more it can charge advertisers for access to this information.

In 2005 Facebook’s privacy policy was simple. No information would be shared with anyone who wasn’t a member of one of their groups. Simple. Have a look at it now it would test the finest information and copyright QC to interpret.

Now that Facebook has sucked in 500 million members it’s payback time. And the bill is going to be paid with information members are submitting unwittingly thinking it’s all confidential.

BP chief executive Tony Hayward has seriously misjudged his crisis management in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The stiff upper lip approach to quietly getting the job done in an ordered and measured way does not wash with a  US audience who clearly expect an emotional, spirited approach to the crisis or hysterical as it may be viewed on this side of the Atlantic.

He has quietly had to become a more hands-on involved leader in the face of withering criticism from the very top, with President Obama threatening to ‘kick his ass’. A less than helpful attitude which did nothing to solve the problem but succeeded in wiping one third off the value of BP shares, a move that hits the pockets of millions of Obama voters – 40% BP shares are American owned.

Not to mention raising the hackles of that great defender of Britishness Lord Tebbit who described the President’s attitude as ‘despicable’

Sources at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the department responsible for looking after UK citizens abroad, suggest it now has detailed plans in place for flying back murder victims from next month’s World Cup in South Africa.

The authorities are now firmly of the opinion it is a question of when and not if, at least one English football fan meets an untimely end over the course of the tournament.

This is the nightmare scenario the South African government is staring in the face.

Despite running the best organised, best financed, best targeted and best resourced campaign for a generation, Scottish Tories only managed a paltry 0.9% increase in their share of the vote.

They managed to return one MP out of 55 a situation that raises questions again of the Tories mandate to govern north of the border, a situation that will no doubt be exploited by those keen for the dissolution of the Union and perhaps inadvertently those who maybe don’t.

It is clear that the Conservative Party twenty years down the line is still suffering from a Thatcher induced hangover of the 1980s, when savage cutbacks in public spending laid waste to large parts of Scotland’s industrial landscape.

This scalpel treatment for the country’s economic woes left a lasting impression among the hundreds of thousands affected.

More importantly for today’s Conservatives though this resistance to anything remotely connected to Tory blue seems to have been passed down a generation.

Alex Salmond’s legal attempt to be included in Thursday’s BBC debate is a far more fundamental act than a simple electioneering exercise.

It is asking some searching and uncomfortable questions about just how British the Corporation really is.

How can the BBC possibly be impartial in its treatment of Scottish voters when excluding the party of government from a TV debate that in many ways is shaping the way many floating voters will cast their ballot. By excluding the Welsh and Scottish nationalists, it is failing in its democratic duty to the the voters across the UK.

Its charter states that it must deliver “impartial and independent reporting of the campaign, giving fair coverage and rigorous scrutiny of the policies and campaigns of all parties”. But clearly it this does not apply to Scotland.

Remebember it is not giving a voice to who, Alastair Bonnington, the former legal adviser to BBC Scotland, terms the 'downright loony parties, we are talking about the party of government.

So keen has the BBC been to stage the leaders’ debates, that it has ignored post-devolution politics. As a result, when matters of health, education, transport or justice have cropped up in the debates so far they have applied to English voters only. That does not mean that viewers in Scotland have been less engaged, but they have had to discount much of what is said, because those matters are decided at Holyrood, not Westminster.

The BBC defend their position by stating that the SNP is not a national party so is not relevent on a UK platform. But what defines a national party? The Tories currently only have one MP in Scotland out of 59 and only 15% of the vote. So why do voters north of the border have to listen to David Cameron broadcasting to a Scottish audience when the SNP the ruling party is not allowed to?

It is not a nationalist arguement but in essence a unionist one . If the BBC still claims to represent the whole of the UK, then it should represent fairly all areas of the union as its charter obliges it to. By barring Alex Salmond and his Welsh counterpart  from taking part, it is simply reinforcing long held views of those in the extremities of the United Kingdom that the organisation is nothing more than a dressed up English Broadcasting Corporation, that pays nothing more than lip service to anything north of the Tweed or west of the Severn.

A leaked CIA document has opened up the debate on just how far the US will go to hold together the fragile NATO alliance fighting in Afghanistan.

For them the fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of the European appetite for the Afghan mission.

But the CIA has identified a series of PR initiatives to keep the Euro electorate on side and it has Afghan women at its heart.