Does China plan to make Australia an offer it can’t refuse?Barack Obama’s historic nine-day tour of America’s Asia-Pacific allies last November inaugurated a renewed US commitment to the region. Along the way, the president made his first visit to Australia, where he left quite an impression. Addressing the Australian parliament, Obama announced an agreement to […]

Cash-strapped cities across the country from Harrisburg to Birmingham are turning to bankruptcy as a last resort. As more and more cities consider taking the plunge, we wonder whether bankruptcy will allow new ideas to put the cities back on their feet.In California, encouraging news from Vallejo: As the Washington Post reports, four years after it declared […]

This week, the European Food Safety Authority rejected an attempt by France to ban a strain of genetically modified corn. France believes the corn, introduced by St. Louis-based Monsanto and called YieldGuard, is harmful to the environment and poses a risk to human and animal health. The EU disagreed.Genetically modified foods are a contentious issue. Activists […]

It is college graduation season once again. Tens of thousands of intrepid young men and women are preparing to venture into a brave new world in which playing beer pong at one a.m. on a Wednesday night is no longer considered a point of pride. And while nine out of ten grads will be walking […]

Bad economic news in southern Europe may be about to take an even more dramatic turn. The New York Times is reporting that many Spaniards are beginning to pull their money out of Spanish banks, moving their savings to safer banks in Germany and England. Media coverage is predicting a “bank run”, a bad sign […]

Via Meadia has been watching the New York Times‘ coverage of the Wisconsin recall race with some bemusement. The race is of vital importance for anybody who wants to understand where the country is headed this year. The bill restricting public employee union collective bargaining rights set off a huge uproar, polarized Wisconsin politics, ignited […]

As the Assad regime in Syria teeters on the edge of a cliff, Iran is trying to strengthen its economic and political ties to Lebanon. While the Iranians do have their supporters among Lebanon’s poor Shia communities and in Hezbollah, many other Lebanese view the Iranians with deep suspicion.As recently as April, an enormous delegation […]

Here’s something every bit as troubling as a looming market crash: A new study commissioned by Ernst & Young found that 15 percent of 1,758 high-level managers from across the world think that an economic downturn is enough justification for using immoral and misleading business practices, a rise from 9 percent in 2010. Apparently almost one sixth […]

Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is perhaps the most widely known economic statistic in the world. But just how useful is it? Li Keqiang, the man widely tipped to become China’s new premier later this year, has asserted that a country’s GDP figures are “man-made”, implying they are an unreliable indicator of economic strength. Li instead […]

It used to be, I think, that the vast majority of strategists and statesmen played chess, or in non-Western cultures some comparably complex game that required players to anticipate what their opponents might do in an extended sequence of moves. This was good training for the real world. If you read in the history of […]