The cardinal sin of political prognostication is static analysis.A short weekend ago the emerging wisdom was that President Barack Obama’s reelection was in peril. The House Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy of California, perhaps the most politically attuned elected member of his party, was saying that while he always believed Republicans would have a good year in 2012, he now thought it was likely

Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t lose too much sleep about China’s Facebook beating him to Wall Street.Renren Inc. is the first social-networking website to go public in the U.S., raising $743 million with which founder Joseph Chen can tap China’s 1.3 billion people. China is a market Facebook Inc. has yet to friend and the U.S. equity market is a place Zuckerberg has yet to tread.Here’s the thing, thoug

MUNICH ― Why did Greece, Ireland, and Portugal have to seek shelter under the European Union’s rescue umbrella, and why is Spain a potential candidate?For many, the answer is obvious: international markets no longer want to finance the “PIGS.” But that is only half true. In fact, international markets have not financed any of them to a considerable extent for the past three years; the European Cen

There was a time when all one had to worry about from video games were ― for parents ― their affects on children’s homework and eyesight, possible violent content, their cost and ― for game makers ― pirated game cassettes.Those good old days were officially over yesterday (May 2) as video game giant Sony apologized for a security breach that caused the loss of some 77 million accounts’ personal in

Greece? Been there. Ireland? Done that. Portugal? Got the T-shirt. For the past year, countries sharing the euro have been going bust one by one.So where’s next? Plenty of people will point the finger at Spain. Some at Italy. A few single out Belgium, a country with high debts, and no government.But they should be looking somewhere else: France.It is increasingly politically unstable, its debt pos

VIENNA ― In a study released in early April, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatovi, reported that 57 journalists are currently in prison in Turkey, mostly on the basis of the country’s antiterrorism laws. With 11 more Turkish journalists also facing charges, the total number could soon double the records of Iran and China,

When President Obama visited El Salvador in March, he offered an acute analysis of the danger represented by homegrown criminal gangs and international narcotics cartels. This is a shared problem with a shared responsibility, the president declared.Nice speech, but where’s the beef? The unrestricted flow of drugs into the United States via Central America ― or Mexico, or the Caribbean ― represents

Are we at a hinge of history? When I heard the news about Osama bin Laden and saw the cathartic outpouring of pride in this country, my mind went back not just to Sept. 11, but to a couple of other dates that mark the course of global events, pregnant with promise or peril.We won’t know for years the consequences of the killing of bin Laden for U.S. foreign policy; they might be transitory. But th

If President Benigno Aquino wonders why the Philippines isn’t shaking its junk-bond status, a visit to the local supermarket might set him straight.There, he will find that food prices are surging and pushing growing numbers of his people into extreme poverty ― the less-than-$1.25-a-day kind. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank says as many as 64 million more Asians may suffer this fate in 201

Global warming has made the protection of the environment a moral ― even a near-sacrosanct ― issue in the developed world. Environmental concerns have reached such a level that the creation of plants or industries that may do Mother Nature damage is being put on the backburner by governments, even in the implementation of economic development projects. In a country like Taiwan, it’s a problem of c