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...Chinese government has begun turning a cold shoulder to Western corporations hoping to cash in on its consumers. Meanwhile, corporations are paying much closer attention to the risks and hidden costs of supplying their home markets with stuff made thousands of miles away in China. None of this necessarily means an end to the extraordinarily co-dependent economic relationship that China and the U.S. in particular have built up over the past decade. But it does mean big changes...
...None of that offers much hope for change. North Korea is already the world's most isolated country; the idea that Kim Jong Il's regime even cares if its isolation "deepens" is dubious at best. But what might change as a result of the blast--estimated to be several times more powerful than the one in North Korea's 2006 test--is how the international community deals with the planet's most destabilizing nuclear regime...
...professional interrogators say the ticking-time-bomb scenario is no more than a thought experiment; it rarely, if ever, occurs in real life. It's true that U.S. intelligence managed to extract information about some "aspirational" al-Qaeda plots through interrogation of prisoners captured after 9/11. But none of those plots have been revealed - at least to the public - to have been imminent attacks. And there is still no conclusive proof that any usable intelligence the U.S. did glean through harsh interrogations could not have been extracted using other methods...
...none of that changes the long-term reality of how indebted Americans are a structural issue that will require more than a couple of months to return to historic normalcy. A recent research note by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco points out that the ratio of household debt to personal disposable income a measure of how "leveraged" individuals are has barely budged from its 2007 high of 133%. In 1960, that ratio was 55% in 1960 and in the mid-1980s...
...none of that makes any more palatable - or defensible in international law - the idea that the world's worst humanitarian disaster continues to unfold within sight of its most international military force. "Somehow the rights of ordinary Somalis seem not to count in the international system," says Alex de Waal, program director at the Social Science Research Council in New York. "The Somali issue is framed entirely in terms of other political agendas...