The Postal Service death spiral continues. Delivery time is slowing, service is worsening, and postal rates keep going up. The WSJ reports that the USPS is planning cuts to more than 260 mail processing centers nationwide, which will eventually result in the loss of roughly 35,000 jobs. Oh, and it will need to charge five cents […]

A 25 foot crack recently appeared in the pavement beside what will be, when completed, the tallest building in China.  The culprit? Shanghai is gradually sinking as groundwater under the city is pumped out at an unsustainable pace and the weight of the 128 story structure, more than 2,000 feet high, seems to be stressing […]

Butcher Assad might be demonized by the UN and the West, but he still has friends like Hugo Chavez. A Venezuelan oil tanker made its second trip to the Syrian port of Baniyas since December, carrying fuel to help Assad stay in power.These are the noble ideals of Bolivarian socialism in action.  As the Great […]

Evangelical religious leaders, including Richard Land of the Southern Baptist Convention, are pushing for “humane” immigration reform. Moved both by their reading of Biblical morality and by the presence of immigrants among their congregations (Land estimates that there are half a million Southern Baptists of Latino heritage, most of them from Mexico, and 40 percent […]

Despite staggeringly low interest rates and multiple rounds of quantitative easing, inflation so far has not put in an appearance. A new report in the Wall Street Journal suggests that this may be beginning to change. A survey of local businesses conducted by the Federal Reserve of Atlanta reveals that while most believe that short-term […]

Iran is holding a parliamentary election on March 2. The two coalitions leading in the polls, the United Front and the Stability Front, are both conservative. The Stability Front,  steadily gaining ground over the more moderate United Front in opinion polls since November, is said to be at “the extreme end of the fundamentalist camp.” Reformers […]

The West knows Vladimir Putin as a cold, calculating strategist, but in the run-up to this spring’s presidential elections, he has been putting on a different persona. Over the past few weeks, he’s made a number of generous promises, from increased salaries for public employees to cheaper healthcare. As a result, his once iffy poll […]

Americans should avoid any feelings of smug superiority about the problems in Europe’s periphery. It’s time for the U.S. to be worried about its “own peripheries”, according to the Financial Times. This FT report talks about underfunded pensions and state and local debt in the same terms it has used for Greece and Portugal.If the […]

The money has run out in Illinois. Despite having already mandated an income tax increase this year, the Democratic-controlled state legislature is facing the need for steep spending cuts. As Governor Pat Quinn said, “The truth is that over the past 35 years too many governors and members of the General Assembly have clung to […]

Syrian anti-Semite, Assad lackey, and 9/11 cheerleader Ali Ukla Ursan can add another accolade to his distinguished résumé: the Pushkin Medal, a top Russian cultural prize. The New York Times rehashes some of Ursan’s greatest hits: On Sept. 25, 2001, Mr. Ursan described his reaction to the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings two weeks earlier. […]