Two historically momentous events will unfold in the next few days. The Americans will decide who will run their country for the next four years, and the Chinese Communist Party will bring in a new leadership that would be responsible for shaping the world’s second-largest economy for the next decade. While there is little similarity […]
It is time for economists to admit that they are stumped. Four years after being blindsided by Lehman Brothers’ collapse, the profession is still stumbling in the dark. Policymakers and pundits still make confident pronouncements, but the conclusions are radically different. The expert disagreements give away the truth: ignorance reigns. Read Here – Reuters
It’s a state of lockdown so extreme that it feels like war. With China’s change in leadership at the 18th National Party Congress just nine days away, “stability and security” has become the number-one issue for all levels of Chinese government. Although “stability preservation” (“维稳”) is always a high priority in China, it has now […]
“We want to survive,” read signs carried by the hundreds of protestors who thronged the streets of Ningbo, a southeastern Chinese coastal city, from Friday through Sunday. Their demand: that the local government scrap plans for an $8.9 billion expansion of a petrochemical plant to be operated by a subsidiary of state-run oil giant Sinopec. By Sunday […]
A stake through the heart might keep Silvio Berlusconi out of Italian politics, but it better be hammered in hard. Last week he renounced all intention of running again for the premiership of Italy, then received a four-year prison sentence (later reduced to a year) for tax evasion. Read Here – Reuters
IS HURRICANE SANDY capable of altering the election result? The presidential candidates are hunkering down and trying to avoid looking partisan as this big, wet storm heads for the eastern seaboard. But any number of calculations are being made by the campaigns. Plausible arguments are flying, explaining why this storm is bad news, or is […]
One reason U.S. politics is almost as popular as NASCAR among American sports is that it gives the little guy someone to root for. Of course, that’s almost never the candidates of the major parties, most of whom are odious concoctions of their own egos and the corrupting forces of money and ideology. But dependably, […]
The Middle East is undergoing a historic transformation. Parts of the region are up in flames, and Asia’s primary powers either have no role or a destructive one. Pakistan, Indonesia and other Asian Muslim countries, as well as India, with the world’s second-largest Muslim population, are largely uninvolved, as if events in the region have no […]
The rest of the world may have forgotten the anniversary, but a neglected border war that took place 50 years ago is now more pertinent than ever. Before dawn on the morning of Oct. 20, 1962, the People’s Liberation Army launched a surprise attack, driving with overwhelming force through the eastern and western sections of […]
Many foreign policy mandarins might not like or understand it, but the foreign policy operating environment is changing quickly. When in 2011 the Swedish Foreign Minister, Carl Bildt, was unable to get in touch with his Bahraini counterpart during the heat of the protest movement there, he opted to publicly shame him via Twitter. When General Electric was […]
looking beyond borders 