Germany’s new coalition government began winning glowing reviews even before it took office in early December. Its coalition agreement, released in November, satisfied many observers on a range of policy areas, both domestic and international. But one European leader wasn’t impressed.
“The gloves are off!” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban declared as Olaf Scholz took over as Germany’s new chancellor.
The US-sponsored virtual summit for democracy on December 9 and 10 was an unprecedented event; a show of American innocence and righteousness. The conference, which selectively and unjustifiably invited the leaders of 100 countries, supposedly was to focus on fighting corruption, defending human rights, and confronting authoritarian regimes. But the main target of the conference was first China and then Russia. Thirty percent of the leaders invited to the conference, according to the Freedom House, are either not free at all or have little freedom.
În 1941, Misiunea militară germană a venit în România ca să ne apere de bolșevism. În 1944, armata sovietică a venit în România ca să ne apere de imperialismul american. În 2022, armata americană a venit în România ca să ne apere de autoritarismul rus. O, libertate și o, democrație, câte mișelii nu s-au comis în numele vostru!
Terrorist groups’ internal communications frequently reveal infighting over a range of issues, from how to allocate resources to disagreements about personnel and finances. One area where terrorists commonly diverge is target selection, an issue that plagues groups across the ideological spectrum.
Many readers will know that the current annual inflation rate, from January 2021 to January 2022, came in at 7.5%, which continues the upward trend we’ve seen for the past year. Prices rose 0.8% in the month of January, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Among EU countries, perhaps no issue is as divisive as “energy policy”. In Europe, every country now has its own strategy for fossil energy, nuclear energy and renewable energy to meet their national interest. From France, which gets more than 50 percent of its energy from nuclear fission, to Germany, which shuts down its nuclear power plants one after another, rely more and more on energy imported from Russia, contrary to the interest of other allies.
Poland has declared its ambition to become the strongest military power in Central Europe. A NATO spending-leader already, Warsaw is eying a two-fold expansion of its armed forces, even though this will entail huge costs and defy demographic trends. Can it succeed?
The biggest stories this week are likely to be the continuing standoff between NATO (led by the United States) and Putin in the Ukraine, the new Russo-Chinese detente, and the Republican Party’s continuing drift toward Trumpism. One way of tying these together to reveal a larger pattern is to talk about the expanded Child Tax Credit. You heard me right. The fate of the expanded Child Tax Credit illustrates a basic problem that runs through all this.
Slippery slope
However, interesting as those experiments and observations might be, they are still the result of specific parameters within a particular setting and an environment that doesn’t resemble real life. Serious and honest behavioral economists both understand and freely admit this. Just because there was one experiment in which 12 university students chose to receive 1 chocolate today rather than 2 tomorrow, one cannot extrapolate from it that the entire country needs a public pension system and a central authority to oversee it, since all citizens are clearly incapable of saving.
Belgian police arrested 13 suspected members of an Islamist terror group in an operation in Antwerp on Tuesday.
The suspects were detained for spreading jihadist propaganda on social media, though police said it was unclear whether they had made concrete plans to launch an attack. Around 100 police officers were deployed at 13 different addresses during the raid.