The American solar and wind industries have had a rough go of it the past few years despite considerable assistance from Washington. Now, the FT reports that A123 Systems, a company that specializes in manufacturing batteries for electric cars, is filing for bankruptcy. This is yet another blow for Obama’s green energy program, under which the company […]

For those who know their Chinese history, Evan Osnos’s essay on the July 23 high speed rail crash that killed forty people outside Wenzhou, which appears in this week’s New Yorker, will bring to mind scary echoes of the Great Leap Forward: [China’s Minister of Railways] Liu [Zhijun] bet everything on high-speed railways. To preëmpt inflation in the cost of land […]

South Africa’s economy has been in a tailspin since widespread strikes began in early August. Over the past few months, the spread of labor unrest to other industries has resulted in credit downgrades from Moody’s and S&P and forced investors to move their money elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time in years. Last week thousands of striking […]

French President Hollande has gotten off to a shaky start, but he’s determined to tackle the country’s most serious social problems: parents and homework. First, the Hollande administration announced a proposal to eliminate the terms “mother” and “father” from legal documents: Legislation that would legalize same-sex marriage and give homosexual couples the right to adopt children […]

First came the news that unemployment had dropped below 8 percent for the first time in years, and then reports that wholesale inventories have risen as well. Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, retail spending is rose by one percent in September, marking the third consecutive month of increases. Increasing consumer confidence may finally be […]

WRM has an op-ed on infostructure in the WSJ today. He writes: Lobbying for more highways and high-speed rail misses the point. What’s needed instead is support for advancing the Information Age economy. Government policy could reward companies that promote telecommuting and teleconferencing, for example, or otherwise facilitate the transition. (Greens take note: These and […]

Some disappointed Romney partisans are angry that Hillary seems to be trying to save Obama’s bacon. That’s a simplistic misreading of a complicated story. The head of a cabinet department should take responsibility when something under their field of operations goes wrong. Remember Rumsfeld and Abu Ghraib? He didn’t give the orders, but something terrible […]

Is the EU going to earn its Nobel Peace Prize? This morning, we feel some hope that it might.Up until now, the EU had not matched the severity of the sanctions being imposed by the U.S. against Iran, citing concerns that they were hurting regular Iranians while leaving the regime in Tehran unscathed. Well, that thinking […]

Those who point to the dysfunction of our political institutions generally raise several distinct but interwoven phenomena. The first is the increased role of ideology in American politics. Both parties have become far fonder, if not necessarily more adept, at abstract thinking, for better or, usually, for worse. Ideological polarization between the two major parties […]

Russian television propagandist Julian Assange may still have a friend in Lady Gaga, but the torrent of support he received from starry-eyed admirers in 2010 has now slowed to a trickle. Last week came the most high-profile defection of all, as the hacktivist group “Anonymous,” which supported Assange in 2010 with a series of cyber-attacks […]