Section: The Atlantic (USA)
Why Would Anybody Adopt the Euro in 2015?
On Thursday, Lithuania became the 19th country to join the euro-zone. The move made it the last Baltic nation to adopt the currency, and the timing was inauspicious—the euro looks more and more like an economic death sentence as depressions spread across the continent. Proving skeptics right, less than 24 hours later, the currency’s value...
What U.S. Intelligence Predicted the World Would Look Like in 2015
Nine months before the September 11 attacks—and just days after the Supreme Court halted the Florida recount, handing the presidency to George W. Bush—U.S. intelligence officials published an 85-page prediction for what the world would look like in 2015. It’s a world that seems familiar in some ways, and utterly foreign in others. And...
Vladimir Putin: The 10th Most Admired Man in America
Each year since 1946, Gallup has asked Americans to name the living man or woman they most admire. The top vote-getters for 2014, announced on Monday, were no surprise: Barack Obama claimed victory in the male category for the seventh straight year, while Hillary Clinton extended her even more impressive run as “most admired woman”...
2014 Had the Fewest Crashes in the History of Air Travel
Judging by media coverage, 2014 has been a bad year for the aviation industry. But as the world anxiously awaits updates from the year’s fourth major air tragedy, an examination of the data shows air travel has never been safer. It has undoubtedly been a horrendous year for Malaysia-based carriers, concluding with the disappearance of...
Fyodor’s Guide
Tens of thousands of dragooned serfs perished while draining the swamps to lay the foundations of St. Petersburg, and residents like to remind visitors that their city, enchanting though it may be, “rests on bones.” Its charnel mansion has fed the imagination of some of Russia’s greatest writers, most notably Fyodor Dostoyevsky, whose works...
The Search for AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ8501
As night fell over the Java Sea on Sunday, Indonesian authorities suspended until Monday morning a search for an AirAsia Indonesia jet carrying 162 people. The Airbus A320-200 had departed the Indonesian city of Surabaya around 5:30 a.m. on what would have been a short trip to Singapore. But air traffic control lost contact with the pilot...
Ukraine and Pro-Russia Rebels Exchange Hundreds of Prisoners
The Ukrainian government and pro-Russian separatists began an exchange of hundreds of prisoners on Friday as scheduled peace talks were canceled for the day and Kiev suspended train and bus service to Russia-annexed Crimea, leaving an already tenuous situation in greater uncertainty. As part of a 12-point peace plan, Ukrainian officials handed...
Putin Cancels New Year’s Holiday for Government Workers
Russian President Vladimir Putin cancelled the extended New Year holiday for government ministers because of the ongoing financial crisis, informing the agencies they must work to help strengthen the economy and take protectionary measures in the face of a combination of governmental mismanagement, dropping oil prices, and economic sanctions that...
The Real Story of How America Became an Economic Superpower
Very rarely, you read a book that inspires you to see a familiar story in an entirely different way. So it was with Adam Tooze’s astonishing economic history of World War II, The Wages of Destruction. And so it is again with his economic history of the First World War and its aftermath, The Deluge. They amount together to a new history of...
Canada’s Foreign Minister: American Influence Will Make Cuba a Better Place
President Obama is receiving sustained criticism from Republican senators, from conservative media and from many Cuban-Americans, for his efforts to reestablish diplomatic relations with Cuba, and to bring about the eventual end of the U.S. economic embargo. But he has strong allies in Canada’s Conservative government, which has otherwise...
