Warren, MI - Here in southeast Michigan the great recession feels more like depression. The region's unemployment rate is 17% and rising. Already the highest jobless rate of any metropolitan area, the carnage will worsen in 2010, as several still operating auto-related plants are slated to close.

Michigan never emerged...

Tendai Biti, Zimbabwe's reformist finance minister, knows something about living on the edge. In July, a brown envelope containing a live 9mm bullet arrived in his mail. A message inside read, "prepare your will." A year earlier the successful 43-year-old lawyer arrived back in Zimbabwe from Johannesburg only to be...

Istanbul: In bustling Istanbul, the city of 15 million that straddles Europe and Asia, headscarves -- from austere greys to fashionable red plaids -- have sprouted like spring flowers. Where once there were few, now perhaps a quarter of adult women wear some form of head covering. Observing the starkly...

Istanbul, Turkey -- Over three days in early October, top economic policymakers plus several hundred global bankers held parallel meetings at posh hilltop venues overlooking the fabled Bosporus, where Europe ends and Asia begins. Serial discussions analyzed the 2007/2008 financial collapse, the measures put in place to clean up the...

On a late September morning in Washington, top Czech and Russian officials voiced strikingly different assessments of world economic conditions. Neither the September 21st remarks of Czech President Vaclav Klaus nor of Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Shuvalov attracted media attention. Reflecting just how dramatically the world has changed since...

In the span of just ten months, key developing countries have accomplished what they could not achieve in the previous half a century: They have shouldered aside the staid 7 nation club of Euro-Atlantic nations plus Japan and taken seats at the top table of economic decision making. With its...