Current affairs

BORDEAUX - In a new best-selling book, French media consultant and author Alain Minc says he can see the day in the near future when all Nobel Prizes will go to Asian scientists and writers.

Austin Dacey, the well-known atheist thinker, writes in The Secular Conscience that secularism is in danger of losing its soul to relativism.

REYKJAVIK - No one yet has any real idea about when the global financial crisis will end, but one thing is certain: government budget deficits are headed into the stratosphere. Investors in the coming years will need to be persuaded to hold mountains of new debt.

There was no gasp, merely a lingering sigh that came with the announcement that the vast bulk of US combat forces would be leaving Iraq by August 31, 2010, with the final departures taking place at the end of December 2011.

LONDON - Bipartisanship seems to have taken a drubbing in Washington since President Barack Obama got to the White House.

Presenting a new and earthy face of French cinema, the outsider candidate "Séraphine" won seven awards at the Césars, the annual French film competition, including best film and best actress of 2008.

MUNICH - To paraphrase Winston Churchill, never have so many billions of dollars been pumped out by so many governments and central banks. The United States government is pumping $789 billion into its economy, Europe $255 billion, and China $587 billion.

Britain's decision to ban outspoken Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders from entering the United Kingdom last week dramatizes the religious tensions that once again loom over humankind.

NEW YORK - The world has yet to achieve the macroeconomic policy coordination that will be needed to restore economic growth following the Great Crash of 2008.

LONDON - "Enrich yourselves," China's Deng Xiaoping told his fellow countrymen when he started dismantling Mao Zedong's failed socialist model.

NEW YORK – The euro suffers from structural deficiencies. It has a central bank, but it does not have a central treasury, and the supervision of the banking system is left to national authorities.

Kaing Guek Eav, known to many as Duch, was not exceptional for being knee-deep in the blood of Cambodia's victims. Most members of the Khmer Rouge were expert in taking lives rather than improving them.

By the time President Obama signed the historic stimulus package in Denver Tuesday, perhaps the toughest challenge posed to him and aides was again unintentionally underscored on our hyperkinetic financial news cable channels.

I delivered this speech in President Obama's hometown of Chicago on Friday, February 13th, the day after the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth.