It's been quite a week on the touchlines of the beautiful game.

Newt Gingrich ended his run for US president yesterday after dazzling in televised debates but slumping to defeat in dozens of Republican primaries under attack from rivals who portrayed him as the consummate Washington insider.

Joe Biden's line was one of the better ones to emerge from the US election campaign so far. If you were trying to sum up Barack Obama's four years in office, he said, you could do it in a bumper sticker: "Bin Laden is dead. General Motors is alive".

One year after he authorised an extraordinary mission inside Pakistan by an elite Navy SEALs unit to kill Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama is not hesitating to put it front and centre in his gathering re-election effort, while implying that his presumptive challenger in 2012, Mitt Romney, might not have been so gutsy.

Out of America: A new play recalls the huge political influence writers once had

It's official: Barack Obama will clinch the Democratic nomination for President tomorrow, ending a low-key primary race that many people probably didn't realise was happening.

Bowing to the inevitable, Rick Santorum quit the presidential campaign today, clearing the way for Mitt Romney to claim the Republican nomination.

Newt Gingrich may be asked to quit and give Rick Santorum free run against centrist favourite

The humiliation of once-proud Detroit, cradle of the American automobile industry and of the sound that became known simply as Motown, seems to know no end as the city has reluctantly and angrily agreed for the first time to share control of its future destiny with the penny-pinchers from far-away Lansing, the state capital.

The reek of rhetorical gunpowder hung over Washington last night as Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama abruptly hurled themselves into the 2012 battle for the White House regardless of the lingering presence of other rivals for the Republican Party nomination.

War of words as challenger cruises to victory in Wisconsin, Maryland and Washington DC

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney will pick up the formal endorsement of former President George HW Bush during a visit to Houston on Thursday, a Romney campaign official said.