After an all-too-brief post-election honeymoon, economic reality is beginning to crash down on France’s new Socialist president, François Hollande. French auto companies are closing factories, and the Hollande government is mostly powerless to do anything about it. As the BBC reports: President Hollande’s campaign slogan was “change is now” but, since he has been in […]

Round two of WRM’s interview on Asia’s Game of Thrones with Lowy Institute blog is now live. Part one available here. Stay tuned for part three.

A far right member of the Israeli Knesset, Michael Ben-Ari, recently received a copy of the New Testament in his mailbox, a gift from local Christian missionaries. He was not enthused, reports the Associated Press: Ben-Ari, an Orthodox Jew, was enraged to receive the book, in whose name he says millions of Jews were slaughtered. […]

President Obama’s first term has coincided with the longest period of sustained economic misery in decades, but for the better part of four years, the president has always had one line to fall back on: It’s Bush’s fault, not mine. And for most of that time, the voters have seemed to agree.This may be changing. A […]

One of the more idiosyncratic economic indicators is the Economist’s famed “Big Mac Index,” which uses the price of the popular McDonalds burger to measure purchasing-power parity in various countries.The Economist evidently isn’t the only news source to look to the golden arches as a sign of the economic times. This piece in the Wall Street […]

We’ve already heard from Harold Bloom in the New York Times and Sally Denton in Salon about how Mormonism and its adherents have dark designs on the U.S. government. Now an overlooked report at The Hill gives hitherto unseen insight into how those crafty Mormons plan to impose themselves upon the American republic—by getting people […]

So a dictatorial government with proven links to terrorists has admitted to having weapons of mass destruction. The Financial Times has a useful roundup of the latest developments in Syria: While fierce fighting continued on Tuesday in Damascus and Aleppo, a foreign ministry representative told a press conference that “any chemical or bacterial weapon will never […]

Mitt Romney is going abroad this week for the first time as the Republican nominee on the obligatory world tour required of all presidential contenders. The trip will provide a much-needed opportunity for Romney to define his foreign policy. We’ve noted before that one of Romney’s greatest weaknesses has been his inability to define himself or his policy […]

The news out of the Eurozone crisis has been all about impending doom, but there is a silver lining for U.S. and Canadian banks, which have taken the opportunity to pick up some cheap European assets. The Financial Times reports: The deleveraging process at eurozone banks is reshaping the US banking landscape. Lawyers, bankers and […]

Meetings of the China-Africa Forum are usually the last place you would expect to find controversy, but South Africa’s Jacob Zuma didn’t get that memo, evidently. Zuma raised serious warnings about China’s presence in Africa at last Thursday’s meeting: Jacob Zuma, the South African president, has warned that the unbalanced nature of Africa’s burgeoning trade […]