Joseph Stiglitz

Production of cannabis in Afghanistan has increased again according to estimates that have been published for 2012 and the business is now worth $65 million a year

Just when you think that the worst has come, been and gone, there will be more stuff hitting the fan in the very near future and that should serve as a lesson to the next head of the Federal Reserve that central banks don’t usually necessarily have the people in mind when they take things over and end up doing a pitiful job.

If Vladimir Putin and Barack Obama can get through their tiff over Bachar al-Assad and stop pulling the covers to their own side of the geopolitical bed, then the Russian leader may just up sticks and move into the US where he will be able to spend his money rather than making out that he is a poverty-stricken in Moscow to the Russian people.

Anniversaries and celebrations of past historic events are part and parcel of our everyday lives. We celebrate to remember and to grow up, to change and to learn from what happened.

Britain has been popping the champagne corks over the economic recovery that has been announced and the bubbly has been flowing. They might want to leave the EU but, they still import more champagne than any other country.

Everything flows, it all evolves and nothing remains static. The Lavoisier Universal Law whereby nothing is created, nothing is lost, everything is transformed. 

If there’s one country in the world that you might not think would be at the top of the outsourcing list and the place to send orders to be fulfilled from the West, it would probably have to be North Korea. The world’s most closed economy, that Communist dictatorship.

I’ll scratch your back and you can scratch mine is the motto of the National Security Agency according to the latest revelations made about the data stored by the immense surveillance program of the NSA, which routinely provides intelligence data with Israel.

Weapons, weapons....everywhere

Subsistence farming never worked because being self-sufficient was firstly nigh-on impossible and secondly limited as well as being dependent on the climate. 

The number 10. From time immemorial it has been a fascination for people around the world, in every culture and in every civilization.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about the guy that moans over his doughnuts and café latte every morning that he hates his job. He hates his boss and he hates the wife and the kids even more and that’s why he still comes into the office

We live in a throw-away world where we don’t repair and as soon as things start looking a bit shabby round the edges and curled up as if they were sandwiches left over from the night before, with the hangover thrown in for good measure, we just bin them. 

It’s science-fiction but it’s true. The next time you need a loan, it’ll be your friends that will be analyzed to see if you arebone fide enough to borrow the money that the bank is considering lending you and above all if you are able to pay that money back to them.

The Old Continent: Europe. They have always liked to pride themselves on the fact that they were quaint guys living in leafy suburbs and going to work along cobbled streets.