Freedom fries are no more and French fries are back on the menu for American neocons. Max Boot now praises France’s Socialist President—in the pages of Commentary, no less—for leading the charge against radical Islam in Mali. He depicts France as the West’s last, best hope in its fight against radical Islam, as President Obama sits on the […]

A mysterious preacher leads tens of thousands of protestors and calls for the downfall of the government; border guards are brutally killed in Kashmir; tribal leaders are assassinated in wartorn frontier provinces; an all-powerful chief justice calls for the arrest of the prime minister. All this, just in the past few days, has thrown Pakistan […]

Public pension funds in major American cities have fallen to an average funding level of 74 percent—well below the 80 percent considered safe, according to a Pew Center study released this week. As the money slowly drains from these funds, cities will be left with a stark choice: Cut promised pension benefits to public-sector workers, or cut vital […]

Has coal found an unlikely friend in Europe’s green policies? According to an analysis in the FT, the people who want to lead the world in clean energy may make their continent a sinkhole for the dirtiest energy resource around. The rationale for investment in renewable energy has always relied on the assumption that fossil […]

Steve Jobs did a lot of things during his life, but solving America’s obesity epidemic wasn’t one of them. In a dubious attempt to combat obesity, insurance companies are turning to app technology that they hope will help doctors motivate at risk patients: In December 2012, Aetna unveiled Passage, a fitness app it developed with […]

On January 7, 2013, the New York Times carried a story about the race to fill the Congressional seat in Chicago vacated by the resignation (apparently for both health and legal reasons) of Jesse Jackson, Jr. The district is still strongly African-American, though less so than it used to be because of recent remapping. The […]

Yesterday Josh Rogin at Foreign Policy reported that the State Department concluded Butcher Assad used chemical weapons against his own people back on December 23. Al Jazeera reported the incident at the time, but it was hardly noticed, and little action or interest was shown by the international community. Now, however, it appears that the State […]

If a robot steals your job, there’s no need to worry. Just buy a robot of your own and pimp it out. So argues Noah Smith in an astute Atlantic article on the promises and challenges of our technological future (h/t Tyler Cowen). Smith points out that innovations in robotic technology will make our economy more productive and […]

The French are known for eating small portions, but in Mali they may have bitten off more than they can chew: France ordered new airstrikes overnight against Islamist fighters in central Mali, as the government in Paris pledged on Tuesday to commit more troops to a potentially protracted campaign against extremists pressing south from a jihadist state […]

In Asia’s Game of Thrones the winds of change are pushing Japan away from China to Southeast Asia.When Shinzo Abe was first inaugurated as Prime Minister of Japan back in 2006, he quickly packed his bags and took off for Beijing. As Japan’s largest trading partner and a growing market for Japanese exports, China was […]