Europe

The main risk over the weekend was that markets, which have now dropped for three consecutive weeks the longest negative streak since January, would focus their attention on the latest batch of negative Chinese economic news released over the weekend, which missed expectations across the board, most prominently in Retail Sales (10.1% vs. Exp. 10.6%, down from 10.5%) and Industrial Production (6.0% vs. Exp. 6.5% down from 6.8%), and following Friday's disappointing new credit loan data, would sell off as the Chinese slowdown once again becomes a dominant concern.

According to David Cameron, the poorest and most vulnerable people in the UK would be hit hardest by the economic consequences of leaving the EU. Leaving the union would be a “national error” Cameron wrote in an article for the Daily Mirror newspaper. He said leaving would see prices rise and threaten jobs, in a move that has been seen as an attempt to reach out to Labour voters. The BBC reports: The referendum takes place on 23 June, when voters in the UK will be asked whether they want the country to remain in, or leave, the European Union.

In a shocking slap in the face for UK PM Cameron, more than 300 business leaders are calling on Britain to vote to leave the European Union, saying that the country’s "competitiveness is being undermined by our membership." As The Telegraph reports, the letter, signed by some of Europe's most senior business executives, claims Brussels "red tape stifles growth" and a Brexit would "create more jobs" exclaiming that "it is business - not government - which generates wealth."

Since the end of the Cold War, we’re had a lot of very instructive experience in the Middle East. Back in 2010, I compiled the real-time analyses I had made of our policies and their results in a book titled America’s Misadventures in the Middle East. The book holds up well as an explanation for the origins and evolution of most of our difficulties in the region. Unfortunately, both the situation in the Middle East and our position there have continued to deteriorate.

Authored by Noam Chomsky, originally posted at TomDispatch.com,

[This piece, the first of two parts, is excerpted from Noam Chomsky’s new book, Who Rules the World? (Metropolitan Books).]

When we ask “Who rules the world?” we commonly adopt the standard convention that the actors in world affairs are states, primarily the great powers, and we consider their decisions and the relations among them. That is not wrong. But we would do well to keep in mind that this level of abstraction can also be highly misleading.