The Tuareg mercenaries of West Africa may have failed to save Qaddafi’s crumbling government last year, but they have had one success—toppling the democratic government of Mali, described by the FT as “one of west Africa’s most stable countries.” According to an FT report, this Tuareg revolt, carried out with weapons brought back from their […]

Social historians of the future are likely to be puzzled by the transportation of a huge rock to the Los Angels County Museum, the publicity surrounding the event and the responses of the crowds of people who observed it. For reasons suggested below, these historians may well include this event among the symptoms of cultural […]

I am traveling this week, and will return to the regular posting schedule next week.

Egyptian liberals were ecstatic over their role in the fall of Hosni Mubarak, but that victory may have been the high-water mark of their movement. The AP reports that following liberals’ poor showing in Egypt’s first democratic elections in years, Islamists took 60 of the 100 seats on the council to draft a new constitution. […]

China has been quietly expanding its business in Africa for years, but now unrest in the Sudans may be dragging it into the regional squabbles it has avoided thus far. While neutrality has served China well in its investments and business ventures in Africa, it may prove an unsustainable and even self-defeating posture, as the Washington […]

Even as French Jews are still in shock and mourning after the murder of Jewish schoolchildren in Toulouse, fear stalks the community. As the BBC has noted, the beating of another student at a Jewish school by anti-Semitic assailants is only the most notable example: Five bullet-holes were found in a window of the Yitzhak-Rabin music […]

President Obama’s recent decision to fast-track part of the contested Keystone pipeline has dominated headlines, but there’s a bigger story beyond the political points won or lost by that decision. The abundance of oil in North America is driving the development of several additional pipelines, says the WSJ: Two major energy companies are planning to build […]

After a week of Rep. Paul Ryan’s deficit-reducing budget plan dominating the political conversation, the Democrats have finally responded with a plan of their own. Whereas Ryan’s plan relies on changes to entitlement programs for the bulk of the reduction, the Democratic plan aims to lower the deficit through cuts to mandatory government programs and […]

The intrigue surrounding Bo Xilai shows no sign of abating in China. Bo himself has been sacked, but now his legacy as mayor of Chongqing is under attack.Always an ambitious man, Bo had hoped to claim a seat on the powerful Politburo Standing Committee by taking on the rampant corruption in his city. To this […]

[Update: this piece has been updated since its original publication.]  President Obama’s off-the-cuff remark to Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, picked up before a press conference by microphones that weren’t supposed to be on, was a brief candid glimpse into the mind of our president and the world of international politics. Here’s the exchange: Obama: On […]