Still needed on Libya: A comprehensive congressional policy review. The Benghazi attack didn’t just represent some operational security problems, as the latest statements from the State Department would have you believe. The NYT reports: “We have to do better,” said Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns. [ . . . ]State Department officials promised […]

As NASA explores the Martian landscape with robots and plans a second series of picnics on the Moon, a handful of companies are working toward the goal of turning a profit by mining the asteroids. The idea is of course as old as science fiction, but this NY Times piece on Planetary Resources shows us […]

Not everyone is as gloomy as we are on the prospects for peace with the Taliban. David Ignatius, for one, takes a much more optimistic view. In this season of good will, there is a rare bit of good cheer about the prospects for peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The reason seems to be […]

Are accountability and honesty about to make an appearance on the political scene in China? The new Chinese leadership looks like it’s going to take a crack at making it so: Xinhua news agency says receptions for high-ranking officers will no longer feature luxury banquets or alcohol. The diktat, passed on 4 December, has also […]

Religion News Service on December 14, 2012, carried a story about a Southern Baptist pastor in Missouri who has been accused of child abuse. At first I glossed over the story, having had my fill of stories about clerical pedophilia (though it is, so to speak, ecumenically welcome that for once the alleged offense cannot […]

[The traditional Via Meadia Yule Blog continues today, Boxing Day, with the third of the Thirteen Posts of Christmas.  From Christmas Eve through to Twelfth Night, we explore the Christmas story and the ideas behind the celebration.]The documentary sources for the Christmas story pretty good by the standards of the ancient world, but few and […]

There is an unremarked paradox in the tumult of the contemporary Middle East. Syria is an economically impoverished country of a little more than 20 million people that has been politically stagnant until 23 months ago. Egypt, by contrast, never socially at rest and with its ancient energies newly bestirred, is at 80.5 million people […]

Some good tidings for Obama’s Afghanistan strategy? It’s emerging that in a speech at a conference last week in France, where Taliban and Afghan government officials were meeting face to face, the Taliban appeared to be making all the right noises to set themselves up as responsible stakeholders in a modern democratic Afghanistan. The speech […]

Russia’s plans to use its energy reserves and the financial assets of Gazprom to establish greater control of the energy distribution in the EU have largely been checked, but that doesn’t mean an end to Russian ambitions. The buy-up of the state-owned gas monopoly in Kyrgyzstan is a significant step forward in Russia’s attempts to […]

One of the biggest fiscal crises facing state and federal government is rising and unsustainable pension costs, as we’ve often had occasion to notice. As more states look at ways to deal with the problem one approach keeps popping up on the radar screen. In Pennsylvania as well as in Kansas, politicians are facing the […]