Sandy’s impact on New York City may not be limited to lost lives, destroyed property, and hobbled infrastructure. By flooding the subways, the storm may force the city’s formidable rat population above ground.How big is the city’s rat problem in the subways? This big (h/t zerohedge):[yframe url=’https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cFxfuu87jc’]And as you shudder at the footage of that […]

California’s pension crisis is metastasizing. Last week we noted that the California public pension fund CalPERS was at loggerheads with the city of San Bernardino, which was using its bankruptcy filing as grounds to default on its obligations. This week, CalPERS sued the city of Compton, which owes $2.6 million to the fund. One detects its […]

The G-20 continues to fade as a serious arm of global governance: Tim Geithner says he won’t be attending the next meeting, the WSJ reports: The U.S. Treasury secretary Tim Geithner will skip a meeting of the world’s top finance officials in Mexico City next week, according to Treasury Department plans released Monday. One of […]

We know what you’re thinking, but the headline above isn’t meant to refer to that guy—you know, the guy with the “bunga bunga” parties and underage models. No, this is another Italian comic, Beppe Grillo, whose Five Star Movement is shaking up Italian politics in a big way. The FT reports: A new anti-establishment party […]

Ann Althouse listens to Glenn Reynolds interview Camille Paglia about her disappointment with President Obama’s first term and nods along vigorously to the points being made: You don’t want government agencies being empowered to intrude into people’s lives like this. The controlling force in Obamacare is the IRS! Okay? This flies in the face of what […]

A new liberal think tank is opening in Berlin. That is, it’s “liberal” in the European sense, which is to say mildly conservative in U.S. terms.“Open Europe Berlin” will cooperate with the original Open Europe Institute in London, an invaluable source of analysis, commentary and alternative ideas for the world’s largest (and by far most […]

Any possible intervention in Mali is weeks away, Xan Rice reports for the FT. Moreover, it is uncertain at this point who exactly would do the “intervening”, whether those forces will be prepared to face the jihadis, and what the situation on the ground in Mali really is. Under the French proposal, the European Union […]

Sandy’s devastating flood surge is the worst disaster in the 108 year history of the New York subway system, and it now looks as if much if not all of the system will be closed for the rest of the week and possibly longer.We can hope that it will take another 108 years till something […]

It was the summer of 2000, and the situation for Egypt’s fledgling civil society community was looking dire. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, a prominent sociologist, had just been dragged from his home and jailed by longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. The 61-year-old academic was held without formal charges for weeks and then prosecuted for a nebulous array […]

Why Nations Fail, by Professors Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson has deservedly gained right of entry to the pantheon of Big Books on economic development.Like the pantheon’s other occupants, most recently—Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, and Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules for Now, Acemoglu and Robinson’s work tackles one of the biggest questions […]