Memo to investors: the Euro crisis is nowhere close to being over. That’s at least Angela Merkel’s take on things: German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Europe’s sovereign debt crisis will last at least five more years.Merkel says the continent is on the right path to overcome the crisis but “whoever thinks this can be fixed […]

A reader follows up on our news write-up from earlier this week titled “Was the Polish President’s Plane Bombed?“: I just wanted to clear some facts on the story – the military attorney general has refuted the claims that there was TNT found on the wreckage that would include a possibility of a bomb. The […]

Nothing is more pointless or more irresistible than to try to predict the outcome of Tuesday’s presidential election. It’s pointless both because so many resources and so much energy has been spent on the forecasting effort up until now and because in just a few days the results of the 2012 election will be universally […]

Between the presidential election and Hurricane Sandy there hasn’t been much room in the news for anything else lately, but for anybody trying to understand the big issues facing the United States a just-released report that Accenture commissioned from Oxford Economics makes riveting reading.Looking at demographic trends and trends in the costs of service delivery, […]

Late last month, violence exploded in western Burma for the second time this year. The government reported over 80 people killed 4,600 houses burned, and more than 22,000 people displaced, numbers that are almost certainly underestimated. This outburst is patterned on a similar orgy of violence in June, when scores of Rohingya Muslims were killed […]

The long fight between New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s education commissioner and the Newark teacher’s union is finally drawing to a close. After a months-long struggle, the two parties have come to an agreement on merit pay. On Monday union members will vote to approve (or reject) a contract where teachers’ bonuses would be rewarded […]

With Greece slowly circling the drain, the Greeks and the European officials charged with rescuing it badly need some good news. Instead, they get this: Quartz reports that the recent case in which an American hedge fund successfully sued Argentina for the full value of its bonds may set a precedent for similar actions by Greek creditors: […]

If you aren’t yet paranoid about someone spying on you using the webcam built in to your laptop or desktop monitor or smartphone, perhaps you should be. There’s a must-read story in Ars Technica about the latest skirmish in the long-running cyber war between Russia and Georgia. The piece is worth reading just for the geopolitical […]

French President Hollande is having a rough first year. He entered office during a grave crisis, and now he is under siege from all sides: his own party is chastising him for abiding by European deficit rules; the opposition has attacked him for raising taxes during a downturn; big business resents his support for government-mandated […]

More than a thousand protestors gathered in Ningbo, China, to protest the construction of a chemical plant that they feared would pollute the environment last weekend. Police dispersed the protestors, and then the authorities announced they were giving in to public anger and abandoning the project.At first glance, it looks like the public furor succeeded […]