Australia has become a popular partner in Asia’s Game of Thrones. Both China and the United States have courted it in the past few months, with varying success. China has highlighted its own economic importance as a major trade partner, while the U.S. has strengthened military cooperation both in Afghanistan and at new American bases […]

Most commentary on Tuesday’s recall vote in Wisconsin has focused on the raw politics of the episode. This is what our media thrives on: who’s up, who’s down, and what it all means looking toward November. Some commentary, thankfully, has delved deeper into the meaning of the entire skein of events over the past nine […]

President Obama has authorized what appears to be the first use of cyber warfare (beyond passive information retrieval), in what Steve Coll has called “the first formal offensive act of pure cyber sabotage by the United States against another country, if you do not count electronic penetrations that have preceded conventional military attacks.” The target? […]

In Egypt, the Arab Spring feels more like an Arab “Thermidor.” Thermidor, one of the summer months of France’s revolutionary calendar, was the month in which Robespierre was overthrown and sent to the guillotine. Today, it’s generally taken to mean the end of the most radical phase of a revolution, or the beginning of the […]

This past week’s New York Times has been a showcase in just how little we understand how our world works and just how fluid scientific consensus can be. On June 2, in a piece entitled “Salt, We Misjudged You,” Science magazine correspondent Gary Taubes debunked the conventional wisdom that salt is bad for us: Although […]

Remember peak oil? This was supposed to be the time when the earth’s oil supply began to run dry. Green energy buffs told us that one reason for subsidizing expensive green energy boondoggles was that the oil would soon be gone and we had to have something to put in its place.As Aragorn might have […]

In Stockton, California, the dangerous combination of high debt and low employment has sent the city into state-mandated mediation to stave off bankruptcy. But the city is already preparing its bankruptcy case in the event that mediation doesn’t work. The Wall Street Journal details the city’s problems: The city of 300,000 in the agriculture-heavy Central […]

This week IMF chief Christine Lagarde betrayed a hint of frustration with Europe’s leaders. She suspects they know how to fix the continent’s problems, but don’t quite have the will, the desire, or the domestic support to do what must be done: “If I was able to do one thing, I would lock them in a […]

Fresh off his visit to India, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta arrived in Kabul on Thursday, where he lambasted the Pakistani government for refusing to go after the insurgents operating from the country’s tribal areas. The secretary’s comments come on top of the failure to agree on a deal to re-open transit routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan, […]

The latest offering from the imprudent documentary crew at Vice magazine is a guide to Karachi, Pakistan’s center of finance, education, and bloody violence. From burned-out neighborhoods to a smoldering dump on the outskirts of town, the Vice boys fraternized with all the elements of a gangster city: inept police forces, murderous politicians, mafioso shadow […]