The protestors in Wukan, who for months have publicly campaigned against local officials and an illegal land grab, are moving on. They are planning a march to a nearby town, committed to enlarging their protest. Upping the ante means trouble for Beijing: the government doesn’t want to pay the political price that a harsh crackdown […]

From the Wall Street Journal comes word that the US, the EU and key Arab oil producing states are putting plans in place to manage the consequences of an embargo on Iranian oil.  Stepping up production and organizing a supply chain could dramatically reduce the effects of a European decision to block imports from Tehran.Those […]

Russia, as Winston Churchill famously said, is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.But Russia was and is as transparent as glass compared to the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of (North) Korea.  Now that the Dear Leader has gone to meet Joe Stalin and Adolf Hitler in the Great Beyond, the world’s experts are […]

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes a story that should make every mediocre academic in this country shudder in fear.  Mark Bauerlein has looked under the hood of the “research” that professors in English literature conduct and he has documented what many of us know but few want to think about: nobody reads much […]

I’m saddened by the passing of Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose exquisite style I’ve admired for as long as I’ve been old enough to know what’s any good. Nevertheless, I can’t bring myself to properly mourn him without reflecting on his failings. All the encomia so far have been adulatory, and much of that is […]

There are seven billion people on planet earth and last week a surprisingly large number of them were making news or otherwise disturbing the peace.  From the Via Meadia newsdesk, some of the events we followed.Doha is dead. Europe is in trouble. Former France president Jacques Chirac was found guilty of embezzlement.One Chinese town continues […]

Recent figures from Greece show an accelerating withdrawal of money from domestic banks; deposits are down 25 percent since September 2009, climaxing in a massive move in September and October as the prospects for a Greek exit from the euro increased.  As the Guardian notes, the withdrawals have several causes; in some cases, the recession […]

More ink has been spilled over the lingering death of the Kyoto Protocol, but the other great international negotiating effort, involving far more people and with a much bigger group of supporting bureaucracies all over the world, is also withering on the vine.That is the Doha Round of trade talks seeking to advance global trade […]

As @JamesMLindsay, the Twitter feed of my old CFR colleague Jim Lindsay, reminds us today, this is the anniversary of the day on which Louis XVI, the Most Catholic King of France, recognized the United States of America as a sovereign nation in 1777.Without that decision, American independence might have come much later if at […]

Fitch, the ratings agency that infuriated Europe yesterday by saying that the continent lacks the political and technical tools to save the euro, is right — at least for now.The latest European plan to fix the euro is already falling apart, just like all its predecessors have done.  A majority of the French oppose it, […]