Just 10 years into a new century, more than two-thirds of the country sees the past decade as a period of decline for the U.S., according to a new TIME/Aspen Ideas Festival poll that probed Americans on the decade since the tragic events of Sept. 11, 2001. Osama bin Laden is dead and al-Qaeda seriously weakened, but the impact of the 9/11 attacks and the decisions that followed have, in the view of most Americans, put the ...

Convened in Washington, in November 2008, the first G-20 summit was a hasty attempt by top economies to forge common cause against a rapidly escalating financial crisis. That initial consensus risks unraveling at the G-20's fourth summit, in Toronto on June 26-27, with the U.S. and the European Union notably parting ways on how best to restore economic health. The summit follows an extraordinary austerity drive by European economies as they attempt to redress their public finances. In ...

These days tenure for teachers is such a brawl in America's elementary and secondary schools that it's easy to forget that it's more a cornerstone of higher education.  When Austan Goolsbee, Chairman of the President's Council of Economic Advisors, announced earlier this month that he was leaving the White House to return to the University of Chicago it was a reminder just how strong the ties — and inducements — of university tenure can be, and why ...

If the past few days are any indication of things to come, Peru's President-elect Ollanta Humala is in for a rough ride when he takes office on July 28. On Saturday, indigenous protesters in the country's southeast radically upped the stakes in their nearly seven-week campaign against the government's mining and oil/gas policies by taking over an airport in Juliaca, the business hub of the Puno department. Five protesters were killed by the police the previous day ...

This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global-news site that translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article below was originally published in Le Monde. While the rest of Europe may be tormented by the thought of having to cough up ever more money to bail out Athens, the once carefree Greeks are getting more depressed by the day. Psychiatrists say that the economic crisis has triggered a 25% to 30% increase in ...

In the inevitable comparisons that economists and businesspeople make between Asia's two rising giants, China and India, China nearly always comes out on top. The Chinese economy historically outpaces India's by just about every measure. China's fast-acting government implements new policies with blinding speed, making India's fractured political system appear sluggish and chaotic. Beijing's shiny new airport and wide freeways are models of modern development, contrasting sharply with the sagging infrastructure of New Delhi and Mumbai. And as ...

THE bitter war in Biafra is a symbol of the continent's divided soul, and the most discouraging example so far of a profound impasse that is crippling many of Black Africa's 30 newly independent states. It is an impasse between tribe and nation, which is also a clash between tradition and change, fact and aspiration. On one side is tribalism: the tenacious loyalty of 140 million Africans to primitive subgroups that represent certainty amid bewildering social and economic upheavals. ...

President-elect Barack Obama said Tuesday the deficit appears on track to hit $1 trillion soon. Speaking to reporters after meeting with top economic aides, Mr. Obama said: "Potentially we've got trillion-dollar deficits for years to come, even with the economic recovery that we are working on." — Associated Press, Jan. 6 Actually, the deficit is on track to hit $1.2 trillion this year, but what's $200 billion among friends? Seriously, what is it? To the average person, a number ...

"Barack Obama has failed America," Mitt Romney said unequivocally at his first New Hampshire town meeting, repeating the signature line of his presidential-campaign announcement speech a day earlier. Unequivocal is not a word that traditionally has been associated with the former Massachusetts governor, but that was then, and the retooled edition of candidate Romney is much improved. He proceeded to lay out the economic case against Obama: 16 million out of work, home values collapsed, higher gas ...

By the time President Obama sat down with House Republicans on June 1 to talk about the exploding public debt, the economic data had been grim for days: another decline in home values, a new dip in consumer confidence and, just that morning, the lowest manufacturing-sector growth rate in more than a year and a dismal payroll report showing job growth far below expectations. In another era, these sorts of numbers would have led to a predictable ...