This year is crucially important.

LONDON It s been a better year for God.

This year will be bleak.

But that won t happen this year.

This year, it was reported to be 20,000.

And the focus this year has shifted decisively away from it.

This year, BNP s great rival, Société Générale, has been in the spotlight.

A favorite of the West, Soludo may not survive the year.

This year, there is another reason why Europe has pressed the pause button for August.

BRUSSELS There are plenty of summits to choose from this year, but the World Summit on Food Security deserves not to be lost in the crowd.

But, this year, with signs of economic recovery emerging, advanced countries have quickly shifted from fiscal stimulus to fiscal consolidation.

This year, China will surpass the US in emissions of greenhouse gases.

Dear Trinidadian media the Haitian earthquake is the biggest and most important Caribbean story, bar none, of the moment and the year to date.

An estimated million more were massacred in Bangladesh in 1971, and only this year have some of the perpetrators local allies been tried.

This year, however, the big spend in Europe may have been inhibited by the big winter freeze and the big austerity programs across most of the continent.

With taming inflation its top priority, the PBC has raised banks mandatory reserve ratio six times this year.

But this year, with rising impatience and anger in South Korea toward the North Korean regime, the food and fertilizer is in doubt.

This year, the international community must move decisively from pledges to action in the effort to reduce poverty.

WASHINGTON, DC August has been a dangerous month in European history, but this year it could be the turning point for the eurozone and perhaps for the world economy.

This year will be bleak. The question we need to be asking now is, how can we enhance the likelihood that we will eventually emerge into a robust recovery?

And the fevered political climate created by US mid term elections means that the world s most important bilateral relationship is headed for real turbulence this year.

And my best guess is that we will see a mix of currency wars, currency collapses, and currency chaos in the year ahead but that this won t spell the end of the economic recovery, much less the end of the world.

Global developments not just in the year ahead, but also during the next decade and beyond, will depend in large part on whether the US can better manage its domestic challenges and divisions.

This year, the 400th anniversary of Galileo s first use of a telescope, has been declared the International Year of Astronomy, so this seems a good time to ponder Kant s first source of awe and reverence.

LONDON It s been a better year for God. After withering literary assaults on the Almighty from the Oxford academic Richard Dawkins, the essayist Christopher Hitchens, and others, believers have hit back.

NEW YORK The global economy, artificially boosted since the recession of 2008 2009 by massive monetary and fiscal stimulus and financial bailouts, is headed towards a sharp slowdown this year as the effect of these measures wanes.

When inventory accumulation is excluded, first quarter growth of final sales was just 0.8 in annual terms and 0.2 compared to the fourth quarter of 2009.

NEW YORK Over the last two years, the majority of countries in the world chose to expand public spending in order to buffer the impact of the global financial crisis on their economies and populations. But, this year, with signs of economic recovery emerging, advanced countries have quickly shifted from fiscal stimulus to fiscal consolidation.

But, taken together, these cancellations make clear that even a US administration that wants to engage more with Asia may still find itself preoccupied with domestic priorities, especially this year, as mid term elections approach.

As this year s deficit is projected to be more than 12 of a shrinking GDP, the debt to GDP ratio will soar above 125 by the end of 2010, the highest in the euro zone.

So, despite revulsion on the part of Germany and the European Central Bank at the idea of a bailout, Greece needs large official financial support this year at rates that are not unsustainable to prevent its current illiquidity from devolving immediately into insolvency.