The border artillery battles between Syria and Turkey keep heating up, though Syria keeps making loud noises about wanting to end the violence. It’s not entirely clear whether this represents duplicity at the top or chaos on the ground; Syria’s central command may not be able to hold its local commanders on a tight leash.Turkey […]

The beautiful and shiny new democracy in Libya continues to experience teething troubles; today the designated prime minister has been forced to step aside after his second failure to get a slate of ministers approved by a fractious parliament.Mustafa Abu Shagur, who spent the last few years in the United States as an optical engineer […]

Speaking of Latin American democracies shooting themselves in the foot, Hugo Chavez was re-elected to the presidency of Venezuela for the third time yesterday with a solid margin of 10% of the vote in his favor. Whether there was significant fraud is not yet being discussed—Henrique Capriles made no mention of it in his concession […]

It’s the oldest trick in the book: when your polls are in the dumps, try to drum up nationalist fervor over a foreign conflict and watch the voters forget what a terrible job you’re doing domestically. With growth forecasts down to as low as 1.5% for this year after holding at almost 8% in 2011, […]

A new Brookings study is cautioning that the global economy is on the verge of another slump. The only bright light? The United States. FT has the summary: The Tiger index shows momentum in the global economy dissipating despite action by the Federal Reserve, European Central Bank, Bank of Japan and Bank of England to […]

The biggest story this week was Mitt Romney’s stellar debate performance. WRM assessed the likely impact on the race: Governor Romney didn’t win the election last night, he just stopped losing it. That may not last; the road to the election is still very long and we are more likely than not to see momentum […]

The current political campaign has always looked like a close contest that may remain undecided until the closing days and even hours of the race, but it’s also interesting as a window into the state of American politics. Possibly because I’m so old myself that this is the fourteenth such campaign I remember (when I […]

A reader wonders, How about the oil industry which receives vastly more subsidy through the tax system than wind energy receives. Does that industry deserve those subsidies after more than a century of operation? Perhaps the oil companies should also be billed directly for aspects of their operations like the cost of maintaining the Fifth […]

Ripples of panic should be spreading through New York City Hall and the Ivy League as staffers and students pass around photocopies of this story from the always informative FT. Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman has some thoughts about the financial industry: too many people work in the sector and they are making too much […]

You might have missed it: a revolution almost happened in Kyrgyzstan earlier this week.Attempts to topple the government in Bishkek have become an almost semi-annual event in Kyrgyzstan: in spring 2010, revolts in northwestern Kyrgyzstan metastasized into major protests that overthrew then-President Kurmanbek Bakiev and instated Roza Otunbaeva as interim President of the Central Asian republic. Since […]