Fresh charges of corruption are shaking up the Workers Party of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, as The Wall Street Journal reported last week. Reforms are long overdue. The most recent “Rosegate” scandal stems from official charges brought by the Federal Police (Brazil’s version of the FBI) after an investigation of …
Dubbed by organizers as “the Protest of 8N” (for November 8), thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of Argentines jammed the streets of Buenos Aires last night to protest against President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner in Argentina’s biggest anti-government demonstration in years. A spokesman for Buenos Aires’s Justice and Security Ministry estimated the …
In an unprecedented fall, the U.S. dropped out of the top 10 for the first time in the 2012 Legatum Prosperity Index that was published today. The index benchmarks countries in eight categories: economy, education, entrepreneurship and opportunity, governance, health, personal freedom, safety and security, and social capital. Legatum’s latest …
It’s Spring Break in Argentina, and tens of thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets to protest the policies of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. Argentineans are angry—about rising crime, corruption, and the virtual ban her government has imposed on the purchase of foreign currencies as it attempts to …
Earlier this month, Ecuador’s National Assembly passed legislation that would nationalize the country’s private credit reporting industry. President Rafael Correa has to decide by November 4 whether or not to sign it. The legislation would permit only the government’s central public data agency to provide credit reports and scores. Private …
The State Department announced yesterday that Russian President Vladimir Putin has informed the United States he will not permit any further activities by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Russian Federation. State officials tried to put the best face on this humiliating rejection, saying they are “extremely …
Recently, The Heritage Foundation reported that the State Department is making major changes to its venerable series of “Background Notes”—transforming them from useful reference materials into a new “fact sheet” format that, in reality, is more often than not just a puff sheet for the Obama Administration’s foreign policy accomplishments. …
On Wednesday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted a little-known section (and there are many) of the Dodd–Frank financial regulation bill that will end up doing the most harm to the people in the Congo that it purports to help. The Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, Title …
Production by U.S. embassies of the State Department’s long-running series of annual “Background Notes” covering every country in the world had long been considered a useful service for the American public. Now, however, they appear to have morphed into yet another taxpayer-subsidized campaign commercial for the Obama Administration. The old …
This Friday, the government of Argentina will announce with great fanfare the last payments on “Boden” bonds issued during the so-called corralito. That was the decade-long process imposed in response to the 2001 financial crisis that included a freeze of bank accounts and the forcing of those with dollars to …
