Bashar al-Assad can breathe a bit easier this morning, as Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan has explicitly ruled out any military retaliation after Syrian forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet last Friday.Turkey’s Today’s Zaman reports: Ankara has long been saying that the Assad regime, facing a 16-month-long uprising, has been massacring its own people and that […]

Now that the Egyptian army has signed off on Mohamed Morsi as the country’s new president, the question hanging in the air is how much authority, if any, he has—and what he’ll do with it.As things stand, Morsi has few formal powers. During its mid-election power grab, the military took control over all legislative matters […]

Fifty years ago (base 10), when I was a kid in the South, only the rich had air conditioning. Now two lawsuits are challenging the lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons: Only 21 of the 111 prisons overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state prison agency, are fully air-conditioned. Many of […]

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has announced a “Fortnight of Freedom” to last from June 21 to July 4. The event, based on the presupposition that religious freedom is endangered in this country, is planned as a very visible demonstration. The “Fortnight” not only ends with the celebration of the major patriotic holiday, […]

News from and excerpts of Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book about the Afghanistan war are whipping around the web today. The book, released Tuesday but not yet read by Via Meadia, looks to be a sobering criticism of the way Team Obama has handled the war over the past three years.As the excerpts make clear, […]

It’s only about half over, but 2012 is already looking like a very bad year for the world economy. The measured optimism that many had going into the year has completely faded. The good signs at the end of last year turned out to be a short uptick rather than the beginning of a long-term […]

Editor’s note: The recent Supreme Court decision about Arizona’s controversial immigration control law has brought the issue of immigration back into the spotlight of American politics, and has done so in an election year. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, which upheld the law’s most debated aspect but struck down several others, immigration issues simmered just […]

Hard to believe, but that’s what the decision handed down by the regional court in Cologne, Germany means: circumcising a child under the age of consent is a crime, notwithstanding the religious beliefs of the parents.Many judges who loyally served the Third Reich finished their careers in perfect peace and quiet after World War Two; […]

More signs of trouble in China. This time the news is that cash-strapped local governments are having to sell off the luxury cars assigned as perks to government officials. These cars are a badge of office throughout China’s vast bureaucracy, even in the middle ranks of government. Such perquisites have traditionally attracted considerable anger among […]

Our regular readers are well aware that the Arab Spring has been far messier and more problematic than breathless media reports would have had one believe. Now, months later, the BBC has issued a mea culpa on its own coverage. Reports the Daily Mail: The BBC’s coverage of the Arab Spring has been heavily criticised—by […]