Suddenly there’s hope that China-Japan relations are on the mend.China’s new leader Xi Jinping met yesterday with Natsuo Yamaguchi, a Japanese envoy tasked with the mission of easing tension over the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The meeting was entirely cordial, a far cry from the nationalist and antagonistic rhetoric from both sides […]

The EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS), launched in 2005 to curb carbon dioxide emissions, is breaking down as the price of carbon flatlines. The Financial Times has the story: The world’s biggest carbon market was left in disarray on Thursday, with prices briefly crashing almost 40 per cent in a matter of minutes, after European […]

Why struggle to pay American rent when you can could afford a maid and a beachside villa for just $1,100 a month? International Living reports on a couple who retired from a stressed out and financially tight life in Florida to a peaceful life near a beach in Coronado, Panama: After paying $135,000 for the house, Ellen and […]

Silvio “Bunga Bunga” Berlusconi has caught another break in the run up to Italian elections: a major Italian bank has revealed huge losses from derivatives that could push it into partial nationalization. That might not matter on its own, but many of the leaders of the parties running against Berlusconi had close ties to the […]

From time to time something goes wrong in every enterprise, and we had just such a breakdown this week. A post on the surprisingly large gap between the results that were widely predicted in the Israeli election and the actual results crossed an important line and did an injustice to someone we very much admire.There […]

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe may be ratcheting up tensions with China, but when it comes to India he couldn’t be friendlier. If it’s up to Abe, the vital confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, through which two-thirds of the world’s oil is shipped, will bind India and Japan in an Indo-Pacific arc of […]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered some tough words on Mali during her Benghazi hearing yesterday. Describing the conflict as a “necessary struggle,” she continued: We cannot permit northern Mali to become a safe haven. People say to me all the time: AQIM hasn’t attacked the United States. Well, before 9/11 we hadn’t been attacked […]

Japan is under fire at Davos this week, accused of juicing its own economy at the expense of its trading partners. Earlier this week, Japan pledged to begin printing money in an attempt to bring down the yen and stay competitive against Chinese manufacturing. This has drawn pointed criticism and raised fears of a global […]

Shale gas is coming to Ukraine, and Russia is fuming. Earlier today Ukraine signed a groundbreaking deal, potentially worth $10 billion, with Royal Dutch Shell to develop the country’s vast natural gas resources. The Financial Times has the story: The production-sharing agreement . . . signed in Davos in the presence of President Viktor Yanukovich […]

If you’re thinking of co-signing for your child’s college loan, let the borrower beware. One grieving mother learned the hard way what this means. According to the FT, when Ella Edwards’s son Jermaine died at 24 years old, she planned to enter retirement and quietly cope with her loss. Instead, she was forced back to work as […]