Instead, they snipe at his foreign minister, the redoubtable Makiko Tanaka, a woman whose outspokenness is unsettling those who prefer Japan's usual ultra-cautious diplomacy.

ECONOMIST: Japanese politics

On sale today, a host of major media outlets have jumped at the opportunity to praise the design, to credit Microsoft and to snipe at Apple and the iPad.

FORBES: Top Marks For Microsoft's Surface Tablet, So Far

This made some greens snipe at him, but it also made Walmart send two of its senior people round to his factory in LaGrange to see what he was doing right.

ECONOMIST: Ray Anderson

Hotheads snipe at the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides for 1m-plus Gazan refugees, accusing it of turning into a security outfit, and labelling its few foreign personnel as spooks.

ECONOMIST: Hamas in Gaza