It is easy to assume that the future shape of the American health care system will be settled one way or the other by the November election. But in turns out that whatever happens in the election, and subsequently to Mr. Obama’s signature health reform, we will still be far from resolving some basic challenges […]

The unrest across the Muslim world, ostensibly in reaction to a tasteless video defaming Islam, which led to the tragic death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens in Libya, dominated news coverage this week. Via Meadia’s two essays tried to grapple with what it all means.For Obama, his foreign policy choices are looking more and more like […]

A reader writes in response to our post on the sentencing to death in absentia of Iraq’s fugitive Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi: Your post Sunday, Sept. 9th, reminded me that Obama & his administration should have negotiated much more intensely to keep a substantial force in Iraq after the deadline that Bush had agreed to. Instead, Obama […]

Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and…Slovenia? Say hello to the newest member of the euro club of troubled nations. The New York Times profiles the country: Small, affluent and westward-leaning, Slovenia was welcomed with open arms into the European Union in 2004 and slipped, almost unnoticed, into the euro union three years later. Yet five years later, this alpine […]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan (pronounced ‘rejep erdowan’ more or less) looked like Woodrow Wilson a year ago. Everywhere he went in the Middle East, crowds hailed him. Like Wilson, he brought a political movement out of the wilderness into power at home. Like Wilson, for his followers he embodied a mix of conservative religious […]

News comes from the London Telegraph that the South African army is prepared to step in to assist the police in the ongoing miner’s strike. The FT reports that 150 army personnel are already there — and that foreign investors are dumping their shares in South Africa’s troubled mine sector.That is just one more sign […]

For the first time, a senior commander has acknowledged that members of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force are in Syria, Reuters reports. For now, they are providing non-military aid, Tehran says, but if Syria is attacked, Iran will use military measures to defend it.With the US administration shaken, off balance and frightened by the […]

More blood has been spilled, American and other, in Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere in the so-called Arab and Muslim “worlds” in recent days. (I say so-called because, as others have pointed out, to speak off-handedly, especially to Americans, of an “Arab world” or a “Muslim world” is to dangerously conflate nations and societies whose […]

Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, has an excellent roundup of the boondoggles besetting China—the kinds of boondoggles only top-down misinvestment can create (h/t Tyler Cowen). We’ve previously noted the problems with China’s solar energy sector, but we haven’t written much about their troubles with wind. Some of […]

The pension drama is beginning to disrupt American life in unexpected ways: it’s even hit professional football.Pensions are at the root of the ongoing NFL referee strike. NFL management noticed that more and more American companies are switching their employee retirement benefits from pensions to 401K’s en masse, so they decided to force top referees […]