Current affairs

Decline-o-mania is back! Talk of America's diminished weight, a "non-polar world" and the rise of Asia's new superpowers to overtake the West dominates political and academic debate on both sides of the Atlantic.

After eight years of misguided policy by the Bush administration in the Middle East, the time is overdue for an enlightened strategy to tackle the region's woes.

NEW HAVEN - The world's fundamental economic problem today is a staggering loss of business confidence.

Quite suddenly, everyone has started looking at maps again. With energy prices spiralling out of control - and energy producing countries growing in confidence as a result - the great game of geopolitics has made a dramatic and unwelcome return.

The growing speculation, fed by the musings of Vice President Elect Joseph Biden, that the incoming Obama Administration would shortly face a nice, neat - if painful - "generated" test of its abilities and its courage is not likely.

NEW YORK - The world is sinking into a major global slowdown, likely to be the worst in a quarter-century, perhaps since the Great Depression. This crisis was "made in America," in more than one sense.

Europeans breathed a sigh of relief at the election of Democrat Barack Obama as the first black U.S. president, ending eight years of growing anxiety over the veiled unilateralism of George W. Bush's administration.

The Niger government has been found guilty of an embarrassing failure to protect an individual from the insidious practice of slavery.

NAIROBI - As a child in rural Kenya, I was a secret admirer of female genital mutilation. I was swayed by talk of friends and elders about how once a girl undergoes "the cut," she gains respect and grown men consider her suitable for marriage.

As senator Obama is heading for his election victory, the expectations for him in Europe could not possibly be more unrealistic and without foundation.

Conventional wisdom has it that one of the few ways left for John McCain to win the presidency is for a national security crisis to intervene before election day.

NEW YORK - This global economic crisis will go down in history as Greenspan's Folly. This is a crisis made mainly by the United States Federal Reserve Board during the period of easy money and financial deregulation from the mid-1990's until today.

Shanghai-When scholars from all across China gathered here recently to assess their country's role in the afterglow of the Olympics, their pride shone as bright as the waxing Autumn Festival moon.

Now that the rock bottom of the global financial crisis has been visited, it is time to stop running with the lemmings and start thinking.

One of the best places to do this is the OECD.

NEW YORK - The winner of America's presidential election will inherit a perfect storm of problems, both economic and international. He will face the most difficult opening-day agenda of any president since - and I say this in all seriousness - the man who saved the Union, Abraham Lincoln.

The free market apostates continue to battle the market. The corporate sector has beaten a hasty retreat. Credit, frozen globally, is being edged out by capital injections into various financial institutions.