And the supposed unipolar moment, when America was left to bestride a single-superpower world?

ECONOMIST: Welcome to the new world disorder

Muscular German industrial and banking mammoths still bestride the world witness Deutsche Bank's recent purchase of America's Bankers Trust or Daimler-Benz's merger with Chrysler.

ECONOMIST: Who��s running Germany?

Major Western brands are unlikely to be able to bestride the globe in the same way they have done over the past 100 years or more.

FORBES: Don't Worry About The Power Of Chinese Brands

The good news for travellers and airlines alike is that the two producers that bestride the market for big jets are now competing on more than price.

ECONOMIST: Airbus has a small problem in the market for big jets

One group of mid-ranking clerics has blasted the election as a fraud, and at least four of the 19 grand ayatollahs who bestride Iran's Shia hierarchy are said to agree.

ECONOMIST: A debate rages about the nature of clerical rule

My ideas will bestride the world like a colossus.

NEWYORKER: The Region of Unlikeness

Many of today's state-owned companies are monopolies or quasi-monopolies: Brazil's Petrobras, China Mobile, China State Construction Engineering Corporation and Mexico's Federal Electricity Commission, to name but a few of the mongrel giants that bestride the business world these days.

ECONOMIST: The East India Company

At almost precisely the moment that the U.S. seemed to bestride the world as no other colossus in history, it is felled, not by by a rival empire lobbing nuclear missiles but by a bunch of murderers armed with plastic explosives.

CNN: Highlights from the world's press