...billion for Ireland - we are inclined to ask: If the United States is clueless, what does that make Germany? The de facto leader of the crisis-ridden, 16-nation eurozone, Berlin has not performed its role brilliantly over the past year...

...President Hu Jintao as its new general secretary. That made Hu, a politician on the rise for more than a decade, the de facto leader of Asia's fastest-growing economy and assured his election as president next year. It was communist China's...

...chatting up people, urging them to give John Kennedy a chance. JFK carried the county. As a senator, as the de facto leader of liberal Democrats for decades, even as a failed presidential candidate, Ted Kennedy was always the same, pursuing...

...billion for Ireland - we are inclined to ask: If the United States is clueless, what does that make Germany? The de facto leader of the crisis-ridden, 16-nation eurozone, Berlin has not performed its role brilliantly over the past year...