With Secretary of State Clinton and Defense Secretary Panetta visiting Australia this week, there has been much chatter that Australia is on the cusp of making a serious choice: America or China. America remains one of Australia’s closest allies, but China is its largest trading partner, and the two have grown closer in recent years.In […]

The educational apocalypse is upon us: Duke and UNC are joining forces. Continuing the stampede toward online education, they are joining eight other schools in offering their students the for-credit program “Semester Online.” Students outside the universities can take part, too, although they will need to apply and pay tuition fees for each class.Semester Online differs from […]

The upcoming meeting between Angela Merkel and Vladimir Putin is a meeting of the two most important political leaders in contemporary Europe. The FT has the story: Angela Merkel will spell out growing German concerns about the clampdown on civil society in Russia when she meets Vladimir Putin on Friday, signalling a sharp cooling of the traditionally […]

The Federal Housing Authority has just reported that it may lose $46 billion on guaranteed loans. This would leave the agency with a deficit of $16 billion, which may require a taxpayer-funded bailout for the first time in history.With the report going live Friday, Congress is already preparing for a fight over a potential FHA […]

“We have to expel the Muslims. We don’t want what happened in Afghanistan to happen here. . . . Muslims are different to us.”Buddhist nationalists like Sayataw Virathu, who volunteered the quote above in an interview, are perhaps the most dangerous threat to the government of Burma and its political reforms, which seem to have […]

It’s been a bad year for South Africa. The series of mine strikes that plagued the country for months has ravaged the economy and tarnished the country’s image with investors. Foreign direct investment in the country dropped 46 percent in the first half of the year alone, a horrible showing compared to other developing countries, […]

Since their use invites devastating retaliation, many strategists today imagine that nuclear weapons can never be used to good effect and are therefore essentially worthless. This perception doesn’t just shape American thoughts about our own arsenal; it impels American leaders to underestimate the difficulties of nonproliferation because they don’t fully grasp the size of the […]

The fetishization of manufacturing is a persistent delusion in modern American politics. The media and the airwaves offer no shortage of doomsayers bemoaning the fact that America “doesn’t make anything anymore” and that the shift to a service economy is leaving millions in the dust. Instead of making tangible products of real value, they argue, Americans will […]

Months ago we saw the first signs that Northern Europe was catching a cold, and the latest data suggests that the cold is here and something worse could be on the way. Germany’s economy is almost at a standstill. The Dutch economy actually shrank by more than 1.1 percent in the third quarter—more than Spain […]

The ongoing disputes over islands in the China Seas have taken a turn toward the absurd. In an effort to bolster its claims of sovereignty, Japan has begun giving Japanese names to small specks of rock that it designates as “islands.” It plans to name several hundred of these over the next year. The WSJ has […]