Financial Times

... “Hopefully spending caps can prove to be a good first step, but with time running out to make the needed changes, it is risky to focus only on the smallest areas of the budget when much bigger problems loom large,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the bipartisan Committee for a Re-sponsible Federal Budget. ...

Russia's leadership seems to be reacting relatively calmly to Tuesday's bombing of Domodedovo airport. This is welcome, but it is also a necessity. It seems terrible to admit, but terrorist attacks of this kind are something Russia, like India, is simply going to have to live with in future – and to which it is vital not to over-react.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group, on Wednesday said that while it supported the renewed focus on spending controls, it had “serious concerns” about the new measures. “This new rules package could actually weaken, rather than strengthen, our ability to deal with the debt,” it said. ...

Imagine a world with a strong China reshaping Asia; India confidently extending its reach from Africa to Indonesia; Islam spreading its influence; a Europe replete with crises of legitimacy; sovereign city-states holding wealth and driving innovation; and private mercenary armies, religious radicals and humanitarian bodies playing by their own rules as they compete for hearts, minds and wallets.

It sounds familiar today. But it was just as true slightly less than a millennium ago at the height of the Middle Ages.

Just two weeks before WikiLeaks released its diplomatic cables, Alec Ross, a leading proponent of all things digital at the US State Department, delivered an excitable talk at an internet conference in Chile. The title was the "battle between open and closed societies"; Mr Ross argued that openness always wins. Yet barely six minutes in he managed to infuriate his Latin American audience by saying that the network "was the Che Guevara of the 21st century".

The great American novelist Mark Twain observed “history does not repeat itself but it rhymes.” Today the rhyme is with the 1930s, and if you don’t hear it, read FDR’s great Madison Square Garden speech of October 1936:

“The whole terrain has changed for Obama,” said Steve Clemons, at the New America Foundation. “The president is now facing a world that is raising its price ...

... group has proposed real cuts to the defence budget rather than just rearranging the categories,” said Bill Hartung at the New America Foundation. ...

By Tim Wu Faced with the evidence presented here about the evolution of promising new communications and media networks over the past century, ...

“It is truly a remarkable plan,” said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. “This plan does it all.”