Despite renewed calls for intervention from humanitarian hawks in Congress, it appears the U.S. military doesn’t want a Syrian intervention. An article in this morning’s New York Times cites Pentagon officials warning that a Syrian operation would be very complicated. One senior defense official said over the weekend that even creating “safe havens,” or protected […]

Weekend readers of the New York Times got an eyeful yesterday; the Grey Lady took a long look at New York state, and the result is an article that could almost have appeared in the Weekly Standard or the National Review. While the Times carefully avoided drawing any indelicate conclusions that might upset its liberal […]

Rail stocks dropped in China overnight on word  that a 1,000 foot section of rail line in Hubei province collapsed after heavy rains. Reports in the Chinese media were contradictory; the official news agency Xinhua reported the collapse, but government websites, local reports and some officials denied that anything was going on.Reports of the crash […]

People are starting to notice: Francois Hollande, France’s “anti-Sarkozy” and the current leader in presidential polls, is serious. He wants big changes to the newly signed European fiscal discipline treaty. According to Reuters, Hollande will not “unravel” the treaty but wants “precise measures” like “big industrial projects”, not “cosmetic changes”: “There are parts of this treaty […]

One of the most experienced observers of Israel and Palestine, longtime American negotiator Aaron David Miller, has taken a hammer to the myth that a pernicious pro-Israel cabal controls US foreign policy and is pushing President Obama and the country towards war with Iran. Writing in the NY Times, Miller observes that The notion that […]

Police headquarters and churches came first, but now Boko Haram has added schools to the list of main terror attack targets. And faced with that new reality, as well as the staggering death toll (over 1,000 in three years, 300 of those in just two short months in 2012), it seems Nigeria’s government is growing […]

Prince Harry is apparently taking Rio by storm — playing volleyball on the beach, visiting a favela and generally getting along with all and sundry. It’s a good thing he’s there, and a good thing he’s doing well; most Brits don’t realize just how much they have riding on their relationship with Brazil.The reality is […]

Friday afternoon I was up in the rolling Dutchess County hunt country around Bard College meeting with students about their senior projects when a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz called. We chatted for a while, and today I see that the reporter, Chemi Shalev, is running a story based on the interview on his […]

President Obama, who’d like to avoid going to war with Iran, is finding himself drawn more and more closely to it on account of his public pronouncements. “Of all the many paradoxes and ironies of this President’s foreign policy,” we wrote, “the reliance of ‘No Drama Obama’ on fomenting a crisis to stave off a […]

…by condemning the 1978 UN Convention Against Gender Discrimination as “incompatible with the values of Islamic sharia.” Need we tell you that the political forces behind this tastefully timed pronouncement were those empowered by the so-called Arab Spring? As the AFP notes: The Freedom and Justice Party, political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, says it […]