Germany’s election campaign is in full swing now that Chancellor Angela Merkel is back from her hiking vacation in the Alps. She’s way ahead in the polls and likely to join the handful of European Union leaders who’ve won re-election since Europe’s economy tanked. She’s maybe the only one who dares ask voters, “Are you better off now than when I took office?” Amazingly, given the state of the rest of the euro area, the answer is yes: Germans have more jobs than in 2005. The unemployment rate has

Haruhiko Kuroda doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat when he arrives at Bank of Japan headquarters each morning. Once inside, I do wonder if he dons a cloak, waves a magic wand and concocts mysterious potions. Kuroda has done something truly supernatural in his five months as governor of the central bank. The more yen he conjures up to produce inflation, the more he mesmerizes markets. Investors are more bewitched by Kuroda than they are by the number 1,000,000,000,000,000. The 15 zeros now needed to exp

This time, international expressions of concern and calls for restraint will not suffice. The Egyptian military’s brutal clearance of Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo demands the same outrage that would follow if secular protesters were killed by an Islamist government. Responding clearly ― and in the case of the U.S., freezing $1.5 billion in annual aid to Egypt ― isn’t solely a matter of principle. Reports of secularist civilians in Cairo attacking the Muslim Brotherhood protesters, and of

A spate of one-day strikes by fast-food workers has renewed the focus on the abysmal pay for so many at the bottom of the U.S. labor market. Amid all the discussion, a theme keeps cropping up: Labor’s share of national income has plunged while corporate profits have climbed to record highs.The numbers are telling. After peaking in the early 1980s at about 66 percent, U.S. workers have seen their share of the national pie decline to about 58 percent, the lowest since at least the end of World War

Countries with Freedom of Information laws “have lower incidence of corruption” and a better quality of life than nations that just recently enforced such a measure or have none at all, according to a study by former Inquirer reporter Edson Tandoc Jr., a Fulbright scholar and doctoral candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.If reminders of his previous words still fail to prod Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to act more quickly on the long-pending FOI bill, perhaps that piece of e

Last Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took part in a ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, an event which, combined with the following atomic bombing of Nagasaki, compelled Japan to surrender nine days later on Aug. 15, ending the Second World War.Also on Tuesday last week, Japan launched its largest warship since the war. The vessel was launched at Yokohama, where Commodore Mathew Perry came with his U.S. Asiatic fleet in 1853 to open Japan to t

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them. To get some sense of how significant this is, consider that if, since June 2010, hiring had risen a third as much as advertised jobs have (rather than only a 10th), and nothing else were different, job creation would be roughly 500

I used to live in Washington, D.C., and I worked at The Washington Post. Now I live near Seattle and work at The Seattle Times in a building just next door to Amazon.com’s sprawling complex.Those facts add up to just a few degrees of separation for the journalists and non-journalist friends curious about my thoughts about Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Post.Sorry, but I have no insights beyond speculation. Bezos, a private guy anyway, is not walking around the South Lake Unio