Munchau on Greece's financial crisis

What are the risks for Europe of Greece's financial crisis?
What are the options available? Munchau identifies 4:
-Greece defaults, and is bailed-out by the EU
-Greece defaults, and is not bailed-out by the EU
-Greece makes painful cuts to public spending, and raises tax levels
-"a fudge", some headline changes are carried out, but the problem is merely postponed


FT.com / Columnists / Wolfgang Munchau - Spartan solutions from Brussels will be fought by Athens

Krauss on nuclear strategy

How likely is a nuclear war? Far more than it was in 1992
Read article

Big government

Can western states afford to keep on spending without raising taxes?
How (in)efficient is government spending?
A long article on the Economist about these issues
(shorter version here)

book review: Grilli di Cortona 2009

I added on my website a review of Grilli di Cortona's book "Come gli Stati diventano democratici"
Click here to read it

A very good introduction to a much-debated issue

Zakaria on illiberal democracies

A very important article by Zakaria, on a 1997 issue of Foreign Affairs, about the distinction between "democray" and "liberalism", and the rise of illiberal democracies.

Charlemagne on Lady Ashton

Charlemagne has a very critical and rather depressing post on the EU's new foreign policy chief, Baroness Ashton

Afghan aid fails to feed the hungry

The BBC features this article on its webiste today, about malnutrition in Afghanistan. "on a UN scale of human development indicators, Afghanistan has slipped from 117th in the world, to 181st - second from the bottom - since the Taliban were ousted"

Mobile-phone culture

A very enjoyable piece on the Economist about mobile phones, how differently they are used in the world, what this tells us about cultural differences among the peoples of the world, and how all this may be changing

Terrorism and security systems

Jim Harper on how to react to the failed attack carried out by the "underwear bomb-plotter". How we react defines whether the attack actually succeeded or failed.

Waziristan: the last frontier

A long article on The Economist about Waziristan, the western province of Pakistan bordering on Aghanistan, which has seen a lot of bloodshed recently. The article makes continuous references to the British imperial times