Crisis | featured news

David Frum says the drought is driving up world food prices, and history suggests that is likely to produce unrest within poor nations. Prediction: 2013 will be a year of serious global crisis. That crisis is predictable, and in fact has already begun. It will inescapably confront the next president of the United States. Yet this emerging crisis got not a mention at the Republican National Convention in Tampa. We'll see if the Democrats do better.

Global alarm over a potential repeat of the 2008 food crisis escalated on Thursday after data showed food prices had jumped 6 percent last month and importers were snapping up a shriveled U.S. grain crop, helping drive corn prices to a new record.

Rival Democratic and Republican plans to raise the government's borrowing ability have thrust Congress into a standoff just one week away from a potentially devastating debt crisis.

President Barack Obama offered strong praise Tuesday for a deficit reduction plan put together by a bipartisan group of senators, calling the measure's mix of tax hikes and spending reforms "broadly consistent" with his own approach to the current debt ceiling crisis.

The Italian austerity budget worth nearly 48 billion euros was approved by the upper house of parliament on Thursday, overcoming its first parliamentary hurdle.

The Israeli government on Monday dropped a threat to issue lengthy deportation orders against journalists aboard a Gaza-bound flotilla, in an attempt to scale back a crisis with the international media.

Greece has secured a second bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, and it too will be on the order of €110 billion, Prime Minister George Papandreou said.

Dutch authorities recalled red beet sprouts from three countries Thursday after samples were found to be contaminated with a strain of E. coli bacteria that was apparently less dangerous than the one causing Europe's deadly E. coli crisis....

The euro zone's economic crisis is over and it is now enjoying a broad-based recovery, Bank of France Governor Christian Noyer said.

The State of Illinois is still paying off billions in bills that it got from schools and social service providers last year. Arizona recently stopped paying for certain organ transplants for people in its Medicaid program. States are releasing prisoners early, more to cut expenses than to reward good behavior. And in Newark, the city laid off 13 percent of its police officers last week.