Expenditure reduction leads to falling household incomes, contraction in public services and a rising incidence of poverty, all without progress toward the professed goal, reduction in the nominal public debt.
The Cyprus problem will never be solved without a paradigm shift away from leaders and referenda, and towards "bottom up" re-unification and tangible, small-scale progress.
Corruption in Italy is a well-established fact. Combined pressure from internal and external sources might perhaps be able to achieve what the Italian political system seems incapable of: a shift to a low-corruption equilibrium. Normal 0 false false false EN-GB JA X-NONE
A complex political triangulation links the Turkish president with the Syrian imbroglio and the Kurdish question, but his political target is receding.
While the Conservative victory is remarkable, it is a mere incident in the fundamental transformation of British politics that is being played out in at least four important chapters. British politics is dead.
The conventional wisdom among nuclear-weapons powers is that their arsenals can only be dismantled multilaterally, step-by-step—yet the associated co-ordination dilemmas keep proving insuperable.
A couple of years back few would expect that a retired politician associated with a small leftist party would make a resounding comeback to politics. But the Cypriot public has questioned partition again and again by electing prominent pro-unification figures.
For many refugees, it is only the smugglers who can get them into and then out of Greece. All other legitimate and safe channels are cut off. For the smugglers, many of whom are poor, income from the refugees means that they can survive.
The political, economic and social situation in Finland remains perplexing. Finns have been told for so long how good they have it, that they now refuse to believe anything to the contrary.
What is it about the police and urban black populations in the US and the UK? The explanation starts with two of the most stretched social hierarchies in the developed world.
