The four most important powers in Northeast Asia, bitterly divided rivals, have all now completed a leadership change: North Korea, China, Japan, and now South Korea are all under new management. Dynastic politics plays a role everywhere: the new Chinese leadership is stuffed with princelings, Japan’s new PM is grandson of a former prime minister, […]

Politicians in Illinois have been wrangling for months over how to solve their state’s public pension crisis. Numerous proposals have been put forth and discussed, but unsurprisingly none of them have received much love from the state’s public-worker unions. Today, a union group known as the We Are One coalition blasted the current proposal supported by […]

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal reports on the rise of “dual-enrollment“, which allows high school students to take community college courses, receiving credit toward both a high school diploma and an undergraduate degree. More students are seizing the opportunity to complete their college education earlier and with less debt:  “It’s a great way to encourage students to have college […]

Incoming Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe hasn’t taken office yet, but he’s wasting no time in telling off China over the Senkaku Islands dispute. BBC News reports: Mr Abe said the islands were Japan’s “inherent territory” and it was his party’s objective was “to stop the challenge” from China.“We don’t intend to worsen relations between Japan […]

One of the world’s greatest killers is making a comeback. Once thought to be nearly eliminated as a public health threat, tuberculosis is again becoming a serious danger due to a rapid increase in drug-resistant strains of the disease around the world. Although the U.S. has long been able to avoid most of the deadlier […]

The Pickering report on Benghazi is a good start, and it shows pretty clearly that the State Department wasn’t working effectively to protect U.S. diplomats in the rapidly deteriorating situation in Libya.What the report did not do, but which still needs to be done, is investigate the whole policy mix leading up to that night […]

A small provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform law was supposed to stop valuable “conflict minerals” from fueling war in eastern Congo. Championed by human rights and advocacy groups like Global Witness and the Enough Project, the provision requires companies that use conflict minerals like tin in their products (cell phones, for example) to explain […]

Separatists in the Spanish region of Catalonia moved one step closer to independence on Tuesday when the two largest pro-independence parties announced their intention to form an alliance and push for a referendum in 2014. As the New York Times notes, these two parties hail from opposite ends of the political spectrum and have failed to see […]

The Persian Gulf is swimming in billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. offensive weapons, as the Obama administration signals to Iran that it is serious about a military option.The Congressional Research Service recently reported a massive jump in U.S. arms sales to allies in the Gulf region, with Saudi Arabia receiving the biggest chunk of the […]

The Sueddeutsche Zeitung is generally regarded as one of the two best newspapers in Germany. I don’t normally read it, but a German colleague sent me the issue of December 7, 2012, thinking that it might interest me. It did. A story, filed by a reporter named Renate Meinhof, covered a breakfast meeting on the […]