It’s not often you hear loud and public support for Jews in Arab newspapers, which is why Egyptian journalist Sharif ‘Abd Al-Ghani’s recent article in a Qatari paper is cause for celebration. Al-Ghani attacks Muslim preachers for their hateful language toward Jews. How, he asks, can preachers lead hateful discussion of Jews, yet venerate Moses? […]

Steve Jobs was one of the great innovators of our time, yet he never finished college. For Jobs, dropping out taught him more than staying in school ever could. For some people, that’s just the way it goes. As he told Stanford students in a 2005 commencement speech, Your time is limited, so don’t waste […]

It is said that there is more joy in heaven over one repentant sinner than ninety-nine who never go astray. Heaven must be celebrating the events in the country formerly known as Burma, which could one day become the country formerly known as Myanmar. As the New York Times reports: The thawing, while in its […]

Time to pop the champagne? The return of manufacturing jobs from China to the US could generate as many as three million new jobs in the US by 2020, according to a new study by the well-regarded Boston Consulting Group. As a result of rising labor costs in China, manufacturing jobs are coming back to […]

Britain has had four serious prime ministers since World War Two: Clement Attlee, Winston Churchill (great even in decline), Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair.  They were right about some things and wrong about others, but they each made a big difference in Britain and in the wider world.  The current tenant at Number 10 Downing […]

I’ve been visiting Brazil every few years since the late 1980s, and the favelas, the large, informal settlements where the poor cluster in and around the major cities, were until very recently uniform scenes of heartbreaking poverty. Millions of poor Brazilians lived without basic city services like sewer and electric power, and the only order […]

W. Brian Arthur, in a report for McKinsey, writes that we are witnessing enormous fundamental changes to the global economy: “in fact”, he writes, “it may well be the biggest change ever in the economy.” This change is due to what Arthur calls “the second economy” or a “digital economy” that exists alongside the physical […]

Two articles in yesterday’s newspapers are working the same story about Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and NATO, with different angles. Panetta, speaking in Brussels, offered praise to NATO for its success in Libya but also charged member nations with failing to contribute their share to the Organization, instead leaving it to the US to fill […]

The latest Open Europe roundup of news from across the pond paints a bleak picture of the state of Europe’s union. As regular VM readers know, the expanding debt crisis has led to intense squabbling among European governments about the role of the EU. Today’s harvest of bad news adds more detail: France and Germany […]

Generations of geostrategists have speculated about the possibility for an alliance between Russia and China.  If those two powers got together, they speculated, they could dominate Eurasia and therefore the world.For a few years after Mao’s revolution, it looked as if that was happening, and it was this strategic nightmare that shaped a lot of […]