By avoiding the truth of the Soviet past, Russians have stored up trouble for the future.

But marriage can be a fraught institution (as Strauss Kahn may know better than most).

The world economy is an interdependent whole trouble in any important part of it is transmitted globally.

And he faced a Congress and an economics profession with a tendency to confuse these real demons with imaginary ones.

Following the disturbances in Tibet and the troubles affecting the Olympic torch s progress around the world, some voices abroad are showing a greater inclination to dismiss, vilify, humiliate, or even split China.

A sick man whose rule at home is being challenged by Islamist opponents, he decided that international ostracism and domestic troubles is too explosive a combination for his son, a spoiled playboy, to handle.

But marriage can be a fraught institution (as Strauss Kahn may know better than most). The British economic journalist Martin Wolf thinks of Europe as a marriage kept together only by the high cost of divorce.

Moreover, while Hamas s long truce with Israel shows that it may be willing to abandon violence given the right amount of persuasion, it can make itself a terrible nuisance if it continues to be excluded.

When Theodor Herzl was making the rounds of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century, trying to gain support for the establishment of a state for the Jews, he was often rebuffed by rich and powerful Jewish grandees, who saw him as a troublemaker.

Commercial banks, investment banks, and hedge funds all owe their ongoing trouble to its decline, which in turn is jeopardizing the plans of companies and entrepreneurs to launch enterprises and make investments, and of households to consume.

The policy and regulatory mistakes that contributed to the subprime mortgage crisis and thus to the US financial system s near meltdown and the eurozone s travails have brought the issue of optimal economic regulation and its relation to democracy to the fore once again.