This is the time in the American election cycle when much ink is spilled on that peculiar American institution known as the Electoral College. The debate has become quite stale and predictable: Reformers (mostly on the left) argue that the college is an antiquated relic of the horse-and-buggy era that offends a basic principle of […]

British Prime Minister David Cameron has granted his Scottish counterpart Alex Salmond the right to hold a referendum on independence, reports the BBC. If successful, the referendum would represent one step toward the disintegration of the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.But Cameron is confident the Scots will choose to remain within […]

The fight against Boko Haram in Nigeria has begun to assume a curious pattern: Boko Haram attacks, soldiers respond, and army officials give contradictory accounts of the incident. This happened again on Monday, when Boko Haram attacked Maiduguri for the second time, pounding the city with 15 blasts from RPGs and IEDs. Soon after the attacks […]

WRM and Zbigniew Brzezinski discuss the troubled state of the Middle East on the PBS News Hour tonight. When we have a link to the show, we will put it here.Livestream link: https://www.rmpbs.org/panorama/index.cfm/tag/news-hour-livestream/contentID/674/navID/595

The American solar and wind industries have had a rough go of it the past few years despite considerable assistance from Washington. Now, the FT reports that A123 Systems, a company that specializes in manufacturing batteries for electric cars, is filing for bankruptcy. This is yet another blow for Obama’s green energy program, under which the company […]

For those who know their Chinese history, Evan Osnos’s essay on the July 23 high speed rail crash that killed forty people outside Wenzhou, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, will bring to mind scary echoes of the Great Leap Forward: [China’s Minister of Railways] Liu [Zhijun] bet everything on high-speed railways. To preëmpt inflation in the cost of land […]

South Africa’s economy has been in a tailspin since widespread strikes began in early August. Over the past few months, the spread of labor unrest to other industries has resulted in credit downgrades from Moody’s and S&P and forced investors to move their money elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in years. Last week thousands of striking […]

French President Hollande has gotten off to a shaky start, but he’s determined to tackle the country’s most serious social problems: parents and homework. First, the Hollande administration announced a proposal to eliminate the terms “mother” and “father” from legal documents: Legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage and give homosexual couples the right to adopt children […]

First came the news that unemployment had dropped below 8 percent for the first time in years, and then reports that wholesale inventories have risen as well. Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, retail spending is rose by one percent in September, marking the third consecutive month of increases. Increasing consumer confidence may finally be […]

WRM has an op-ed on infostructure in the WSJ today. He writes: Lobbying for more highways and high-speed rail misses the point. What’s needed instead is support for advancing the Information Age economy. Government policy could reward companies that promote telecommuting and teleconferencing, for example, or otherwise facilitate the transition. (Greens take note: These and […]