A comprehensive guide to spending cuts across Whitehall

Visitors from 'high risk' nations to be asked for deposits of £1,000 or more

Ministers should be given annual performance appraisals to see how well they are doing their jobs, a former head of the civil service said today.

"We heard this posh voice come over the radio and knew it was Big H"

When Japan's Liberal Democratic Party suffered its first election defeat in more than 50 years, it was widely heralded as the end of an era. Just three years later, however, the LDP has made a spectacular comeback, more than doubling its seats in the lower house of the Diet and catapulting Shinzo Abe – the former Prime Minister who lasted just a single, shambolic year in office – back into the top job.

The death toll from a typhoon that devastated mountainous and coastal towns in the southern Philippines with ferocious winds and flash floods this month has risen to more than 1,000.

There have times in the 22 months of the Syrian uprising when it seemed Bashar al-Assad might have been toppled – only for the rebels to falter, outgunned by his resurgent forces. But now, for the first time, there appears to be a feeling that he too will become a victim of the Arab Spring. Despite its massive superiority in weaponry, and the indiscriminate way it often uses it, the regime is ceding more and more territory to the opposition.

Branko died in front of his country's diplomatic delegation

Syrian opposition figures will push at a donor conference in London today for the provision of anti-aircraft missile systems to repel President Bashar al-Assad's devastating airstrikes, as momentum builds to adjust a European Union arms embargo.

Miners and their families welcomed expelled politician Julius Malema today as he told the thousands who gathered at the site where 34 miners were killed this week that South African police had no right to fire the live bullets that killed them.

Read the headlines and it was the candidate's foreign trip from hell: a succession of mishaps capped by an expletive-laden tirade from an exasperated aide to an equally exasperated group of reporters. In fact, Mitt Romney's foray to Britain, Israel and Poland is likely to have only the tiniest impact on his chances of winning the White House in November.

British ministers will boycott the opening matches of the Euro 2012 football tournament in protest at the civil rights record of co-host Ukraine, William Hague announced, following the lead of other European governments.

Words that Tony Blair spoke over the phone to George Bush on the eve of the Iraq war are to be made public, a tribunal ordered today.