The good news? The Fed is passing out more heroin in the form of cheap money. It’s going to be buying $40 billion of mortgages a month, hoping to keep interest rates down and boost house prices. Since the ECB is taking the same approach to sovereign debt in Europe, nobody’s going into withdrawal anytime […]

A mansion belonging to the late Rafiq Hariri, formerly the prime minister of Lebanon until his assassination in 2005, is on sale to a select group of “wealthy international buyers” for the cool price of £300 million. That more than doubles England’s previous house-price record. CNBC (via the FT) has the details: The 45-bedroom, seven-storey building runs […]

Recovery may be underway, but most American families aren’t feeling the love. The recent census report shows that despite (extremely slow) increases in national GDP and employment, inflation-adjusted household income—an indicator with far more impact on the lives of most Americans—has been dropping since 2009. As the New York Times notes, median household income is now 8.1 […]

Rumors are swirling that senior figures in the Taliban are willing to enter into serious negotiations with American forces. These assertions should be taken with a fair pinch of salt, but if true, this is welcome news.According to the Guardian, two former Taliban ministers, a former mujaheddin commander and an Afghan mediator with experience of […]

The Associated Press puts the death toll from two devastating factory fires at 314, of which 289 were killed in a fire at a garment factory in Karachi. Most of the deaths were caused by suffocation as people caught in the basement were unable to escape when it filled with smoke, said the top firefighter […]

The march of equality though the last century and into this one is an unequivocally good thing. But there’s another, more troubling sense of the word “equality” that we would just as soon not see make much headway. According to a new Pew report (h/t Forbes), since 2008 the number of whites and Hispanics who rate themselves as “lower […]

Despite earlier indications that the euro-skeptic Socialist and Freedom Parties would clean up in today’s Dutch election, exit polls show that voters have decisively cast their votes for the more centrist, pro-Europe parties. The Dutch election, widely regarded as a referendum on the broader European project, will likely be seen as another vote in favor […]

Market watchers everywhere are breathing sighs of relief today: the German Constitutional Court dismissed a popular challenge to the constitutionality of the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the proposed €500 billion euro bailout fund. As The New York Times reports, Chancellor Merkel is breathing a sigh of relief as well: “Once again, Germany today sends a […]

Yesterday’s message from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was clear: We will not apologize for freedom.After violence erupted in Cairo over an anti-Islamic film produced in the United States, many were upset about an apologetic tweet from an Embassy staffer lamenting the existence of a film that attacked a religion so openly. Washington disavowed the tweet, […]

The NYT reports on the European Union’s struggle to investigate Gazprom’s pricing and policies, and the Kremlin’s rebuttal: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia issued a decree on Tuesday that had the effect of prohibiting Gazprom, the state natural gas giant, from cooperating with European Union investigators trying to build an antitrust case against it.The […]