President Rousseff isn’t taking Brazil’s economic deceleration lying down. Her administration is responding to slow growth with massive government investment in infrastructure. It is also continuing to push interest rates down by strong-arming the country’s two largest national banks. The good news is that Brazil needs infrastructure and investment, so many of these projects are […]

A case of forced abortion—not uncommon but here documented in rare detail—is breathing new life into the smoldering resentment of China’s one-child policy, the Economist reports: Even three years ago, Ms Feng’s suffering might have gone unnoticed outside the remote village in the north-western province of Shaanxi where she lives—just another statistic in China’s family-planning programme. But […]

Although the Big Decision isn’t scheduled until Thursday, the Supreme Court may have already set the tone for the week by judging like Solomon. There was a decision for conservatives upholding Citizens United. There was a decision for liberals banning mandatory life in prison without parole for juvenile offenders. And there was a split decision […]

The ongoing saga of Israeli-Russian rapprochement has produced an intruiging subplot: the deterioration of Israel’s bond with the Republic of Georgia.Once upon a time, Georgia saw Israel as a model and an inspiration, another small country who had survived a struggle for statehood in the face of overwhelming hostility from its neighbors. Israel, in turn, […]

Humanitarian watchdogs are aghast at the news of sizable cuts of European development aid to poor countries. The BBC reports on how the pressures of Europe’s economic crisis have reversed a decade-long upward trend in aid: In the year 2010-11, Spain cut its aid budget—the sixth largest in Europe—by nearly a third.Greece cut its much smaller […]

Construction has been one of the main drivers of China’s economic growth, responsible for roughly 15 percent of GDP in recent years. But as the Financial Times notes, China’s housing market has two faces: a frothy bubble in the biggest cities, where house prices are out of reach for all but the wealthiest Chinese, and hangover and […]

After discussing the conflict in Syria with President Barack Obama at the G-20 Summit this week (Zaman), Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued fresh calls for action against the regime (Radikal). Three days later, spokesman for Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Selcuk Ünal, denied claims published in the New York Times that Ankara had paid for shipments […]

The Egyptian People have spoken, and the military has dutifully recognized Mohammed Morsi as the country’s first democratically elected president.The timing of this announcement (and the long delay while ballots were, ahem, processed) is indicative of a calculated political move by the ruling generals. It is likely that the military and the Morsi camp talked […]

Is America “pivoting” in Asia, or “rebalancing?” This is the kind of question that keeps bureaucrats writing long memos, but in the real world the labels are less important than the facts. In his recent speech at the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta adopted the term “rebalancing” to denote Washington’s enhanced […]

In most western countries, central banks are, at least in theory, wholly divorced from the political process. Central bankers are selected to terms far longer than that of the average politician—and they are typically allowed to oversee numerous changes in political leadership during their time at the helm—in order to insulate them from the rough […]