Europe

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

Just hours after the predictable passage of today's Turkish referendum, the EU has promptly slammed the outcome, warning it threatens to slide the country's collapse into "authoritarianism" and that Turkey's accession talks with the EU will be suspended if the constitutional package is implement as per today's outcome.

Authored by Judith Bergmann via The Gatestone Institute,

Japan's demographic "time-bomb" has been widely documented in recent years: as we discussed most recently in February, as troubling as Japan's deflationary economic quagmire is, the biggest threat facing Japan has little to do with its balance sheet and everything to do with its demographics, for the simple reason that not only is Japan's population the oldest it has ever been, as well as the oldest on average in the entire world, but is now also officially shrinking.

As previewed yesterday, on Sunday Turks voted on a referendum on the country's presidential system whose outcome will likely place sweeping new powers in the hands of President Tayyip Erdogan and herald the most radical change to the country's political system in its modern history. The package of 18 amendments would abolish the office of prime minister and give the president the authority to draft the budget, declare a state of emergency and issue decrees overseeing ministries without parliamentary approval.