Greece, Portugal, Italy, Spain and…Slovenia? Say hello to the newest member of the euro club of troubled nations. The New York Times profiles the country: Small, affluent and westward-leaning, Slovenia was welcomed with open arms into the European Union in 2004 and slipped, almost unnoticed, into the euro union three years later. Yet five years later, this alpine […]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan (pronounced ‘rejep erdowan’ more or less) looked like Woodrow Wilson a year ago. Everywhere he went in the Middle East, crowds hailed him. Like Wilson, he brought a political movement out of the wilderness into power at home. Like Wilson, for his followers he embodied a mix of conservative religious […]

News comes from the London Telegraph that the South African army is prepared to step in to assist the police in the ongoing miner’s strike. The FT reports that 150 army personnel are already there — and that foreign investors are dumping their shares in South Africa’s troubled mine sector.That is just one more sign […]

For the first time, a senior commander has acknowledged that members of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Force are in Syria, Reuters reports. For now, they are providing non-military aid, Tehran says, but if Syria is attacked, Iran will use military measures to defend it.With the US administration shaken, off balance and frightened by the […]

More blood has been spilled, American and other, in Benghazi, Cairo, Tunis and elsewhere in the so-called Arab and Muslim “worlds” in recent days. (I say so-called because, as others have pointed out, to speak off-handedly, especially to Americans, of an “Arab world” or a “Muslim world” is to dangerously conflate nations and societies whose […]

Patrick Chovanec, a professor at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management in Beijing, has an excellent roundup of the boondoggles besetting China—the kinds of boondoggles only top-down misinvestment can create (h/t Tyler Cowen). We’ve previously noted the problems with China’s solar energy sector, but we haven’t written much about their troubles with wind. Some of […]

The pension drama is beginning to disrupt American life in unexpected ways: it’s even hit professional football.Pensions are at the root of the ongoing NFL referee strike. NFL management noticed that more and more American companies are switching their employee retirement benefits from pensions to 401K’s en masse, so they decided to force top referees […]

A circuit judge in Dane County, Wisconsin has ruled that the state’s controversial law limiting public sector unions is unconstitutional. Previously in different cases the Wisconsin Supreme Court and a federal district court have largely upheld the law.It will take time for the lawyers to sort this one out. Is the Dane County judge, as […]

The presumptive next leader of China, Xi Jinping, has reappeared after a mysterious and unexplained two week’s absence from public view. As the New York Times reports, the Chinese media ran photos of Xi (pronounced ‘she’ as in ‘She who must be obeyed‘) on a visit to the China Agriculture University in Beijing. There has […]

Surprisingly, the energy revolution has been something of a no show in the presidential race so far. This is too bad. As the Economist‘s Lexington columnist notes, neither candidate has yet shown that he has a clear grasp of what U.S. energy policy should look like. Obama’s policies, in particular leave much to be desired: For the most part, […]