The Obama administration has tried to play it safe in Syria. But even a safety play has risks. The New York Times has the story: The past few months have witnessed the emergence of larger, more organized and better armed Syrian militant organizations pushing an agenda based on jihad, the concept that they have a divine […]

Leaving the wreckage of his London visit behind, Mitt Romney has gone to Jerusalem where he must hope better things await. London was a lost opportunity but ultimately unimportant; the Israel visit, however, matters much more to the ex-governor and to his campaign.The press almost always overlooks this, but the argument over Israel policy in […]

This week’s essay on the consequences of the upcoming energy revolution took on the greens—specifically the recent wail of despair from George Monbiot: “We were wrong about peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all.” Mr. Monbiot and other greens, who profess to be able to understand the maddeningly complex systems surounding the climate, nevertheless […]

Well that didn’t take long. We predicted the UN global arms treaty would fail, and it did: Negotiators at the United Nations failed to meet a Friday deadline to complete a new treaty aimed at regulating the estimated $60 billion global arms trade business, as major weapons exporting nations, including the United States, said more […]

Call it 21st-century Gunboat Diplomacy. China is turning up the heat in the South China Sea dispute, and the show of force couldn’t have come at a worse time for China’s neighbors, according to the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (h/t @LizEconomy): On Sunday (22 July), China said it would station troops at Sansha, but did not […]

In India’s northeastern Assam state, tension between Muslims and ethnic Bodo communities reached a fiery peak earlier this week. Thousands of people have fled the violence, dozens of homes have been burned, and more than 40 people have reportedly been killed. Many of the dead were found in the forest with limbs hacked off by […]

Two steps forward, one step back in Europe: after the German parliament rebuked a Cologne court’s decision to ban circumcision in Germany, an Austrian province went ahead and banned the practice. The provincial governor, Markus Wallner, said he had halted circumcisions until Austria formulated a uniform approach to the practice, a religious duty for Muslims and Jews. […]

Fellow AI blogger Peter Berger is always a stimulating read. This week, he tackled the anti-obesity movement as embodied in Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on sales of large sodas in New York City. Peter has studied how the anti-tobacco movement gained legitimacy and finally succeeded in its goals beyond its wildest dreams, and finds many parallels in […]

Earlier this week, the BBC reported on an ultraconservative Salafi MP who has been found to have strayed from the light: Police officers told the Misdemeanour Court in Tukh, outside Cairo, that they had found Mr Wanis caressing a fully-veiled woman student who was sitting on his lap in his car while it was parked on […]

The dust has settled: According to the Wall Street Journal, Viacom and DirecTV have declared a truce in their contract standoff, meaning DirecTV viewers can now go back to watching their SpongeBob, Daily Show, and Colbert Report. The seven-year agreement, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was reached after DirectTV instituted a nine-day blackout of Viacom […]