What kind of welcome can France’s new head of state – its first socialist president in decades and only its second ever – expect in Washington? Le Figaro correspondent Laure Mandeville writes that this time around, no alarm bells have been ringing at the White House, but that on a range of issues having to do with Afghanistan, NATO, the euro and eurozone debt, the election of François Hollande...

How long will it be before America’s friends and adversaries all have the same drone technology that the U.S. is using to such effect in places like Pakistan’s tribal areas? Based on this article by columnist Laura Gil of Colombia’s El Tiempo, that time has already arrived – along with some of the most complicated questions involving civil liberties, human rights and international...

The New York Times is reporting that the “would-be suicide bomber dispatched by the Al Qaeda branch in Yemen last month to blow up a United States-bound airliner was actually a double agent who infiltrated the terrorist group and volunteered for the suicide mission,” according to American and foreign officials. The Times: In an extraordinary intelligence coup, the agent left Yemen, traveling by...

On Friday last, Warren Buffett’s right-hand man and Berkshire vice chairman, Charles Munger, told CNBC, “Gold is a great thing to sew into your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939,” “but I think civilized people don’t buy gold; they invest in productive businesses.” Your meaning is well taken, Charles, but your two dichotomies are surely false. Civilized people...

WASHINGTON — Economic austerity is a dangerous, self-defeating intellectual fad. Perhaps I should say that’s what it was, given Sunday’s election results in Europe. Perhaps I should also say good riddance. Voters in France, Greece and even Germany — a hotbed of the austerity cult — told their political leaders, in no uncertain terms, that boosting economic growth is more important...

Despite his dreadful human rights and anti-democracy record, Vladimir Putin’s first decrees as President could help to reverse centuries of socio-economic backwardness compared with the West and trigger better lives for Russians-in-the-street. They could also give cause for trepidation by triggering changes in the geopolitical balance among the US, Europe, China and Russia. In the ornate room from which the...

The CIA has folied a new Al Qaeda plot to use a new version of an underwear bomb to blow up an American airline: The CIA thwarted a plot by al Qaeda’s affiliate in Yemen to destroy a U.S.-bound airliner using a bomb with a new design, a U.S. counter-terrorism official tells CBS News. Officials, however, deny there was ever any immediate threat to the public. U.S. officials tell CBS News the plot involved...

Do Chinese leaders have a conception of themselves as being destined to govern the world – in other words, ‘Chinese exceptionalism’? This editorial from The Manila Times outlines, from a Filipino point of view, how resentful Chinese Communist Party leaders are of America, and how little they understand about the meaning of moving from a uni-polar world, to a multi-polar one. The Manila Times...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

What do the words ‘rule of law’ mean to China’s leadership? This editorial from France’s Le Monde expresses the hope that those charged with leading the world’s most populous nation have learned something of the profound meaning of the phrase, from the struggle of Chen Guangcheng – a man who overcome all obstacles to fight for the rights of his own people – within...

Germany’s Angela Merkel will sleep less easy tonight because the French people have confirmed their opposition to her austerity programs for all Europeans except Germans by electing Francois Hollande as their new President. Tom Janssen, The NetherlandsThe Merkel-Hollande clash will occur soon since she is the first foreign leader he will meet after his swearing in by May 15. He is also likely to clash with...

Patrick Chappatte, Le Temps, Switzerland In France the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande has defeated incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy to become the first Socialist President of France since 1995. This will give him the power to name the new Prime Minister of France, though no clear front runner has yet emerged. But the victory for the left may not be as much as they had hoped. For one thing there is a debate as...

There are national elections today in France, Greece and Serbia, and local ones in Germany and Italy. These being very different countries, there are of course many local issues that will decide some of these races. But the overriding issue that unites all of them is a referendum on the present high-finance-friendly policies of governments throughout the continent. This isn’t a good guy-bad guy choice....

Did anybody seriously think that at the Guantanamo trial of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others the merciless Al Qaeda terrorists who planned an executed the quintessential “high concept” bloody publicity stunt would go quietly into the judicial night — and their own likely executions? If so, they are not seriously thinking that anymore. The trial got off to a rocky start —...

Is Washington encouraging the Philippines and Vietnam to challenge China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea? In this at times conciliatory and at other times peppery editorial from the state-run Global Times, which reads like a summary of what the U.S. and China have been discussing since Friday, Beijing unambiguously warns Washington not to try to make up for its economic weakness with what it...

China watchers and non-watchers have differing opinions on China’s decision to let activist Chen Guangcheng apply to leave China for the United States, on the trustworthiness of the Chinese government and on the pros and cons of Chen’s acceptance of such an opportunity. Here’s a roundup. Andrew Jacobs at the New York Times says China’s decision wasn’t a major concession at all: Based on past experience,...

Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

There has been a flurry of accusations that the Obama administration botched the case of blind Chinese dissident lawyer Chen Guangcheng when he was, for all practical purposes, “handed over” to the Chinese earlier this week without concrete assurances that he would not be prosecuted, persecuted, or worse. Chen, who has protested China’s laws on forced abortions and sterilizations of women — part...

What are the ramifications of what now appears to be the irreconcilable relationship between the United States and Pakistan? Le Monde columnist Frédéric Bobin, in this very European examination of all that has gone wrong between the two nations, writes that an unsettling future awaits the United States, Pakistan and all of of South Asia, thanks largely to ‘annus horribilis 2011.’ For Le Monde,...

If you say the name “Adolf Hitler” among other things that comes to mind is a political madman who gassed millions of Jews in his infamous “Final Solution.” But the release of his medical records now up for bid online suggest his life was marked by another kind of gas: major flatulence. And he was also a coke head, to boot: It’s a whole other side to the Nazi dictator, whose condition...