I’m saddened by the passing of Christopher Hitchens, a writer whose exquisite style I’ve admired for as long as I’ve been old enough to know what’s any good. Nevertheless, I can’t bring myself to properly mourn him without reflecting on his failings. All the encomia so far have been adulatory, and much of that is […]

There are seven billion people on planet earth and last week a surprisingly large number of them were making news or otherwise disturbing the peace.  From the Via Meadia newsdesk, some of the events we followed.Doha is dead. Europe is in trouble. Former France president Jacques Chirac was found guilty of embezzlement.One Chinese town continues […]

Recent figures from Greece show an accelerating withdrawal of money from domestic banks; deposits are down 25 percent since September 2009, climaxing in a massive move in September and October as the prospects for a Greek exit from the euro increased.  As the Guardian notes, the withdrawals have several causes; in some cases, the recession […]

More ink has been spilled over the lingering death of the Kyoto Protocol, but the other great international negotiating effort, involving far more people and with a much bigger group of supporting bureaucracies all over the world, is also withering on the vine.That is the Doha Round of trade talks seeking to advance global trade […]

As @JamesMLindsay, the Twitter feed of my old CFR colleague Jim Lindsay, reminds us today, this is the anniversary of the day on which Louis XVI, the Most Catholic King of France, recognized the United States of America as a sovereign nation in 1777.Without that decision, American independence might have come much later if at […]

Fitch, the ratings agency that infuriated Europe yesterday by saying that the continent lacks the political and technical tools to save the euro, is right — at least for now.The latest European plan to fix the euro is already falling apart, just like all its predecessors have done.  A majority of the French oppose it, […]

The Asian unrest, a much bigger deal long term than the over hyped Arab Spring or even the crisis of the euro, is spreading from China to Indonesia, as strikes pop up across the fourth most populous country in the world.The Asian industrial revolution is the single most transformative social event on our planet today.  […]

Is American manufacturing making a come-back? According to Joel Kotkin, that’s what the numbers indicate. Thanks largely to the rising cost of wages in China and the discovery of cheap natural gas everywhere from Texas to New York “the U.S. industrial base has been on a powerful upswing, with employment climbing steadily since 2009…In 2011 […]

The decline of the manufacturing Rust Belt has been one of the great American tragedies associated with the decline of the Blue Model. Once vibrant, working-class cities have become hollowed-out crime-ridden shells of their former selves. Decades of well-meaning attempts to deal with this have so far produced a confusing hodgepodge of conflicting policies which […]

Hollywood and China just can’t seem to get along. Just three years after famed director Steven Spielberg spurned the Beijing Olympics over concerns about Darfur, Christian Bale has gotten into a spat of his own with Chinese officials. The New York Times reports: The actor Christian Bale was assaulted by government-backed guards on Thursday when […]