NEW YORK: Financial markets abhor uncertainty; that is why they are now in crisis mode. The governments of the eurozone have taken some significant steps in the right direction to resolve the euro crisis but, obviously, they did not go far enough to (...)
NEW YORK: The campaign to ensure that companies engaged in extractive activities disclose all of their payments in their host countries is gaining momentum — and France is leading the effort. President Nicolas Sarkozy should be applauded for (...)
NEW YORK: In 2010, economic conflict between the United States and China became one of the most worrying global developments. The US pressed China to revalue the renminbi, while China blamed the US Federal Reserve policy of “quantitative easing” for (...)
CANCÚN: The official communiqué from the Cancún climate-change conference cannot disguise the fact that there will be no successor to the Kyoto Protocol when it expires at the end of 2012. Japan, among others, has withdrawn its support for efforts (...)
NEW YORK: The Roma have been persecuted across Europe for centuries. Now they face a form of discrimination unseen in Europe since World War II: group evictions and expulsions from several European democracies of men, women, and children on the (...)
NEW YORK: Continued discrimination against Roma in Europe not only violates human dignity, but is a major social problem crippling the development of Eastern European countries with large Roma populations. Spain, which has been more successful in (...)
COPENHAGEN: It is now generally agreed that the developed countries will have to make a substantial financial contribution to enable the developing world to deal with climate change. Funds are needed to invest in new low-carbon energy sources, (...)
NEW YORK: Twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, the world is facing another stark choice between two fundamentally different forms of organization: international capitalism and state capitalism. The former, (...)
BRUSSELS: Hated, alienated, and shunned as thieves and worse, the Roma have for too long been easy and defenseless targets for disgruntled racists in Hungary, Romania, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and other European countries.
The Roma, as a (...)
NEW YORK: US Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson's $700 billion rescue package has run into difficulty on Capitol Hill. Rightly so: it is ill-conceived.
Congress would be abdicating its responsibility if it gave the Treasury secretary a blank cheque. (...)
In his novel 1984, George Orwell chillingly described a totalitarian regime in which all communication is controlled by a Ministry of Truth and dissidents are persecuted by political police. The United States remains a democracy governed by a (...)