Media is awash with hysterical reports.
It turns out that the only thing that alarms Europeans more than a swaggering American president is one who seems weak.
Asia accounted for more than half of world output for 18 of the last 20 centuries. Its growing clout in the world economy is, therefore, a "restoration" not a revolution.
How did as shrewd a politician as Mr Obama find himself stalemated? If not checkmated, so early in his presidency?
He is a democrat through and through.
His various appearances before congressional committees resembled nothing so much as the clubbing of a baby seal.
Even Major League Baseball is considering relocating its 2011 All-Star Game, the first ever slated to be played in the state. To Arizona's conservative machos, this one hurts — especially since it recalls the National Football League's decision in 1991 to move the 1993 Super Bowl to punish Arizona for not making the birthday of Martin Luther King a holiday.
For the Democrats, this is a great opportunity. For years, they have enjoyed a consistent advantage over Republicans on "mommy" issues, such as education and health care. But Republicans have trounced them on "daddy" issues, such as killing terrorists and defending the homeland. The Democrats have lost a lot of elections because they are easy to caricature as the party that thinks "there are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven't yet accommodated".
Republicans and Democrats differ sharply as to which mighty institutions pose the greatest threat to the little guy. Democrats, by and large, think big corporations are the problem. Republicans think big government is.
But the protection offered by a cradle-to-grave welfare system hides a dark underside.
British government has been running, using nursery rhymes: "Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water. There was none as extreme weather due to climate change had caused a drought."
But as Messrs Dornbusch and Edwards pointed out, "at the end of every populist experiment real wages are lower than they were at the beginning".
Behind a fig leaf of constructive engagement.
Mr Steinberg, a professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by Bismarck's complex personality. He started writing about him because he wanted to understand how his hero led three wars and unified Germany without commanding a single soldier, without a big political party backing him, without any experience in government before his nomination as minister-president of Prussia in 1862 and without great oratorical skills. Bismarck had near-hypnotic powers over William. He manipulated him with temper tantrums, tears, hysterical outbursts and frequent threats of resignation. "It is hard to be king under Bismarck," sighed the sovereign.
What should really worry policymakers is the unknown unknowns.
£ £ Law, justice, rules
I would rather be judged by 12 than carried by six.
Last year America shut down a fake embassy in South Africa, complete with the Stars and Stripes and a photo of President Barack Obama, that had been operating in Ghana for a decade. It had been selling fake visas to America for $6,000 each.
The less people know about how laws and sausages are made, the better they sleep at night (Bismarck).
Arkansas has an unhappy history of multiple executions: in 1923 a man was taken from his coffin and put back in the electric chair after he was found still to be breathing.
Imagine a traffic-light regulation that says: "On green the driver may cross the road, unless, under the given circumstances, a reasonable person would consider this to be risky, inadequate or reckless. We now need a lawyer as a co-driver."
Does a bill that does nothing actually do something?
Perhaps half of America's private-sector employers ask job applicants to declare their criminal records, and two-thirds routinely run checks before taking people on. They see it as necessary due diligence. Unfortunately, checks that individual firms believe to be prudent are collectively bad for the 7m Americans who have spent time in prison and the 70m with a criminal record.
Fish are slippery characters, with little regard for international agreements or borders. The speediest, such as crescent-tailed bluefin tuna, can slice through the ocean at 70 kilometres per hour. Their routes take them beyond areas that come under the jurisdiction of individual coastal states, and into the high seas.
Oilmen groom the politicians; politicians do their best for the oilmen. Corporations grease the legislators, legislators return the favors.
"The moon was in its seventh house and Jupiter lined up with Mars," said Mr Chambers after senators overwhelmingly voted for the ban.
The thicker the rule book, the bigger the headache when it drops on you.
Many talk of being sovereign as if it were like being pregnant: one either is or is not.
Prison is an expensive way to make bad people worse.
Mathew, an Irish judge at the turn of the 20th century, is said to have quipped that justice in England is open to all, "like the Ritz Hotel".
Sophisticated legal services are somewhat like luxury cars and handbags, in that a high asking-price is taken as a sign of quality. No one wants to have hired the cheaper firm in a high-stakes lawsuit.
Parliament was so quiet you may hear a bill drop.
A generation ago Saadallah Wannous, a Syrian playwright, famously lamented that his people were "sentenced to hope".
Asking the justice system to reform itself was like tying up a dog with a string of sausages — the legislative sausage machine.
What happens to our digital property after we die?
Every oil spill has a silver lining — if you are a lawyer, that is.
Winston Churchill thought Parliament should meet for no more than five months a year.
A former kangaroo skinner faced a kangaroo court.
The hangmen job advertisement, published only in the state- owned Sinhala-language newspaper, drew 178 responses. Applicants included a man with one eye, autorickshaw drivers, retired military men, labourers and a university student whose many attempts at securing other employment had failed. Ten aspirants were rejected, mostly because they were too old or too young. One woman was turned down on the ground that her gender would make her too emotional. No other qualifications were required, beyond a basic school education. Officials worried that a more erudite class of executioner might be tempted to chuck in this job for another. Two (anonymous) candidates have been chosen to fill the vacancies. But since neither of the two previous executioners hanged anybody during their tenure, and one has since died, training the new recruits poses a challenge.
Suppose you want to buy a table. But you care about orang-utans, indigenous peoples and carbon emissions, so you don't want it made with illegally harvested logs. Or suppose you run a chain of furniture shops, and you don't want to go to jail for buying illegal timber. Either way, you face a snag: how to tell if a log is legal?
Rape laws also determine whether consensual sexual activity involving young people is legal. The first recorded law on this was in England in 1275, which made it an offence to have sex (with or without her consent) with a "maiden within age". This was interpreted as meaning below the age of marriage, at that time 12 (Shakespeare's Juliet was 13 at the time of her romance with Romeo). A 17-year-old and a 15-year-old can have legal sex in one European Union country (Denmark) but commit a crime if they canoodle in Britain (though in practice the risk of prosecution would be minimal).
Some prisons in Brazil are so chaotic that inmates are not released once their sentences are over. Other prisoners, such as Marcos Mariano da Sil- va, a mechanic arrested for murder in 1976, are victims of mistaken identity. He spent six years in jail in Pernambuco before the real culprit was arrested and he was released. Three years later he was stopped by traffic police who rearrested him as a fugitive. He spent 13 more years in jail, contracting tuberculosis. He died last year, hours after hearing that the state government had lost its appeal against paying him compensation.