The European Union is huffing and puffing anew about Jewish construction in East Jerusalem, all of which will no doubt smooth the path to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s re-election. Running against Europe and for Jerusalem is a no-brainer for an Israeli leader. Netanyahu must be secretly blessing the EU foreign ministries for boosting his chances […]

Editor’s Note: The following is Ambassador Ronald E. Neumann’s testimony to the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs on “Benghazi and Beyond”, from November 15, 2012. Ambassador Neumann, president of the American Academy of Diplomacy, served as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan from 2005 to 2007. He also served as U.S. Ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain, […]

South Africa’s foundering ANC party may have received a shot in the arm: Cyril Ramaphosa, a former union leader and respected businessman who helped draft South Africa’s first democratic constitution, has been elected deputy president of the party.Ramaphosa has mostly kept out of politics in recent years, concentrating on growing a vast business empire. By reentering […]

Strange, 1984-esque tidings are coming from Texas, where a school district has threatened to expel a student due to her refusal to wear an RFID tracking “spy chip,” a move that is eerily reminiscent of “big brother” and his policies of total social control.The Northside Independent School District in San Antonio implemented the “Student Locator […]

An excellent new column in the FT takes on one of Britain’s biggest flaws: its widespread tendency to underestimate its own relevance. Although Britain is no longer the globe-dominating power it once was, it remains one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world, a fact that too many Britons tend to forget: If […]

This past June, the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization warned us that “Land and water resources are now much more stressed than in the past and are becoming scarcer.” A new report suggests that is incorrect.While the world has indeed hit “Peak Farmland”, says the report, the reason for the coming reduction in land devoted to agriculture isn’t […]

China has a long and bloody history, and one of the bloodier episodes is the Taiping Rebellion, in which a Chinese man claiming to be the younger brother of Jesus led a violent uprising against the corrupt Manchu dynasty ruling China. The conflict raged for 14 years before coming to an end in 1864, with a […]

The U.S. is not the only country in the Western Hemisphere whose politicians are pushing back against powerful teacher lobbies: Mexico’s newly installed President Enrique Peña Nieto, just days after releasing an ambitious reform agenda that aims to dislodge nearly all of Mexico’s entrenched industries, unveiled a plan to eviscerate Mexico’s powerful teacher lobby and […]

Is the New York Times finally catching on to America’s energy revolution? In a recent op-ed, NYT columnist Roger Cohen let his readers in on the good news that America is set to become an energy exporter by the end of the decade, reshaping geopolitics and boosting the American economy. With a roaring energy boom and better demographics than other […]

The official government review of a terrible factory fire in Bangladesh that killed 112 people suggests that sabotage by some employees and gross neglect and malfeasance by the owner of the factory are responsible for the tragedy.Via Meadia has a couple of thoughts:In many ways industrial revolution in the developing world is retracing the steps […]