1. David Hockney.

Outlook Johnson County in Kansas is one of the wealthiest suburbs in all of America. Everything always works, everyone always smiles and it is nearly always sunny, even if it is freezing cold. You'd like it.

The German chancellor Angela Merkel pressed for the removal of the former premier Silvio Berlusconi “in order to save the Euro”, according to a report that has caused a political storm in Italy.

Stephen Foley says some of the oil giant's American employees are now set to face criminal charges

Public face of newspaper Stuart Kuttner, now 71, is drawn in to scandal

Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack on the United States to coincide with the 10th anniversary this year of the 11 September atrocity. The planning even went as far as considering candidates for the attack, a report in The Wall Street Journal claims.

Interview: George R R Martin - The best-selling author brought grit to fantasy fiction – and he hopes the 'Game of Thrones' TV adaptation will keep it real

BP could face further controversy in the United States over its divisive alliance with Rosneft, after Russia's deputy prime minister, Igor Sechin, signalled yesterday that the state-controlled oil and gas giant may seek a seat on the British company's board.

Was Andy Coulson's resignation – as well as a failed attempt to bury bad news – the result of a lefty, media-village obsession, or does it really matter?

The United States plans to send 1,400 more Marines to Afghanistan to try to hold on to recent but fragile security gains, just months before a planned US drawdown, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday.

Who is Don Draper?" That question – with a few supplementaries thrown in – has already sustained three fine series of Mad Men and it was the very first thing you heard in episode one of series four, as if to bring fans back to basics after the recess. The question was asked, in this instance, by a reporter for Advertising Age, prompted to do a small feature on Don and his new agency by a Glo-Coat Floor Wax commercial that has "caused a bit of a squeal". Don, though, was not in any mood to sell himself. "I'm from the Midwest," he replied. "We were taught that it's not polite to talk about ourselves." To give him his due – he has a lot on his mind right now. His new agency is up and running, but the employees of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce are having to lie about the scale of their operation, referring offhandedly to a "second floor" that doesn't actually exist. There's no guarantee that they'll get enough new accounts to keep the firm going, and some of the accounts they do have are proving tricky. With Thanksgiving looming, Sugarberry Ham has sent just one tin of the product into the office – a slight that Pete reads as a sign of imminent defection to another agency – and Don is struggling with the Jantzen account, a self-styled "family-firm", which is attempting to hold back the advancing tide of bikini miniaturisation.

Stock market investors in the Philippines thought they had earned a buck or two yesterday, as their benchmark index soared by 14 per cent during the first three hours of trading. Sadly for them, the Philippine Stock Exchange then decided to suspend trading as it published a statement conceding that he gains were erroneously produced by a brand new computer system launched yesterday morning. In fact, share prices had fallen by 0.1 per cent over the three hours in question. Let's hope no one spent their winnings.

Why did I decide we would charge online? Because I listened to [my] executives, the case they made, and the revenue involved and the success of it.

Point two on Peter Watt's book, Inside Out, was made by Iain Martin, now a must-read blogger at The Wall Street Journal.