In a recent article in the Financial Times, “Why a little knowledge of inflation can be dangerous” Russell Napier muses on the possible return of the circumstances of the 1970s - most particularly inflation. After a good, smart slap at academics and their infatuation with the efficient markets hypothesis for “making it even more likely that lessons from the pre-disinflationary era are not yet priced in,” Napier notes that “investors unburdened by dreams of efficiency and prepared to learn the lessons of history will have a decided advantage in the search for positive real returns.”

Global attention focuses on North Korea (the DPRK, or Democratic People's Republic of Korea) and the crisis that envelops its nuclear and missile programs. A little-noted aspect of the crisis has been the rise of Japan to centre stage in the Security Council proceedings and in the formation of global understanding of the problem.

On April 8, 2009, pirates attacked a US-flagged cargo vessel, the Maersk Alabama, about five hundred kilometers off the Somali coast. The ship, which carried a crew of twenty US nationals, including their now famous captain Richard Phillips, was on its way to Mombassa in Kenya with a cargo of soya, maize and cooking oil destined for the UN World Food Program. In the early hours of the morning, a group of four teenage gunmen armed with AK-47 assault rifles, the ubiquitous tools of African conflict, boarded the 17,000 tonne ship using grappling hooks. When the unarmed but well-trained crew put up stiff resistance, the pirates were forced to retreat to one of the Maersk Alabama's lifeboats, taking with them Captain Phillips as a hostage. He was subsequently rescued five days later when US navy snipers aboard the USS Bainbridge shot dead three of the pirates and captured the fourth alive.

By the yardstick of Jacques, the melancholy philosopher-clown in William Shakespeare's play As You Like It, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) has indisputably passed the stage of “Mewing and pucking in the nurse's arms.”

Nor is SCO anymore the “whining schoolboy, with his satchel/And shining morning face, creeping like snail/Unwillingly to school”. The SCO more and more resembles Jacques' lover, “Sighing like a furnace, with a woeful ballad/Made to his mistress' eyebrow.” Indeed, if all the world's a stage and the regional organizations are players who make their exits and entrances, the SCO is doing remarkably well playing many parts. That it has finally reached adulthood is beyond dispute.

Although the worldwide campaign against nuclear weapons was in the doldrums during the early 1970s, the antinuclear movement maintained a lively presence in the Pacific, largely in response to nuclear testing in that region. Spurning the Partial Test Ban Treaty, the French government continued atmospheric nuclear testing on Moruroa in the South Pacific, sending deadly radioactive clouds drifting across Pacific island nations. In response, New Zealand activists began defying the French government during 1972 by sailing small vessels into the test zone. Joining the fray, the New Zealand Federation of Labour pledged a strict ban on French goods and the Labour Party took a principled stand against continued nuclear testing, leading to its election victory that November. In Australia, thousands joined protest marches in Adelaide, Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney; scientists issued statements demanding an end to the tests; unions refused to load French ships, service French planes, or carry French mail; and consumers boycotted French products. In Fiji, activists formed an Against Testing on Moruroa organization, which, in 1974, began planning a regional antinuclear conference.