To look at the Taiwan stock index in the last couple days, youd think the China-friendly Kuomintang had already won the presidency and reopened talks with Beijing. The market jumped 5% on Monday and Tuesday"its biggest gain since mid-2004"led by stocks in airlines and banks that could profit from closer cross-strait links. It shed 1% later in the week, but exuberance is still in the air.

Well, now we know. Australians didn't vote their pocketbooks on Saturday, but rather, their fears on global warming, the war on terror, and industrial relations. John Howard's Liberal Party government was kicked out of power in one of the worst electoral defeats for an incumbent government since World War II—to a bland, younger, Mandarin speaker, the Labor Party's Kevin Rudd. The defeat was so total that Mr. Howard may even lose his own Parliamentary seat.

Several years ago, an astute colleague in a totally different field of history, made a comment that has rattled around in my brain ever since. I'd talked of my fascination with a novel trend in commentaries on Shanghai. It had long been touted as unusually modern for a Chinese city (this idea first circulated between the mid-1800s and 1940s, then regained currency in the 1990s), but now it was often presented as downright futuristic. “If you're interested in that sort of thing,” he said (or something to this effect), “keep an eye on Dubai.”

India's stock market made its biggest single-day gain of 893 points on Nov. 14, fuelled in large part by companies that were once members of the Reliance Group. If only the Ambani brothers, Mukesh and Anil, had managed to keep together the empire their father built, their combined value today would've made them the world's richest business group. Instead, a bitter fraternal feud continues, fueled by an energy deal gone sour.

Without better management of water resources, the world’s current consumption will likely need to double by 2050 to provide food for a global population of some nine billion, according to the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development.

Former Prime Minister Abe Shinzo and other Japanese politicians are fond of appealing to the Meiji Restoration when calling for reform.

When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the years big China story? Theyll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, dealing with everything from toy recalls to carbon emissions, space exploration to currency controls, Beijings Olympic preparations to Pudong getting the worlds tallest skyscraper.

The rise of the billionaire Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand's most popular politician ever, is the story of paradoxes left behind when the dust from the late 1990s financial crisis settled.