WASHINGTON — President Obama scored an historic victory by making health care accessible to almost all Americans. Of course, this victory came at a price. The president was not able to win over a single Republican. Nobody who has witnessed the fierce debate in Congress, the comparisons with Hitler and Stalin, and the tumultuous protests [...]

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WASHINGTON — The health care legislation that has just been passed by the U.S. Congress after almost a year of political wrangling is being hailed as a sweeping overhaul of a troubled system.   For some, the reform package does not go far enough.   President Obama’s opponents describe the health bill as a costly [...]

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In this first video of a four-part series, Russian and European experts analyze U.S. President Obama’s performance from an international perspective.

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BERLIN — The roughly 2.7 million immigrants of Turkish origin in Germany have been at the center of the country’s debate on immigration and integration as long as the debate has existed. Now, almost 50 years after the first Turkish guest workers arrived, a new phenomenon gains attention: University-educated children of those immigrants increasingly leave [...]

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WASHINGTON — “Bush was right” is not a view frequently expressed in the New York Times.   But, there it was, in Thomas Friedman’s March 10 column:   “Former President George W. Bush’s gut instinct that this region craved and needed democracy was always right.” Friedman was referring to the elections that took place this [...]

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It is official – China has emerged as the world’s reining export champion, dethroning Germany for the title in 2009.   China’s exports of goods totaled $1.2 trillion last year, slightly ahead of German goods exports of $1.1 trillion.   It was in 2003 when Germany knocked-off the United States for the top spot, although [...]

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Whatever its merits for rescuing European nations mired in crises, German finance minister’s 7 March proposal for a European Monetary Fund (EMF) provides an opportunity for Europe and the United States to get the future of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) right. The IMF, a creation of the Bretton Woods accords of the 1940s, was [...]

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VENICE — The Greek crisis is the product of decades of mismanagement in public finance, a lack of transparency, and the pitfalls of sovereign debt in an age of credit default swaps. But the resolution of this crisis and others of differing scale and kind besetting Portugal, Spain, and Italy (and Ireland and Iceland) will [...]

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BERLIN — “The King is dead.   Long live the King!” is a traditional proclamation made following the accession of a new monarch.   The same pragmatic approach was adopted by the EU Commission President when the new Ukrainian President visited Brussels Monday on his first official trip abroad: José Manuel Barroso, in welcoming Viktor [...]

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BRATISLAVA, Slovakia — When Aleksander Lukashenko, the authoritarian president of Belarus, recently began a campaign to intimidate and punish members of the country’s disobedient Polish community, he opened a new front not only with neighboring Poland, but also with the EU as a whole.   That challenge must now be met head on. Lukashenko knows [...]

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