The NYT ran an interesting story today, reporting that Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi appeared in public yesterday with the country’s head military leader Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi. el-Sissi denied the accusations that the military “detained, tortured and killed civilian protesters during the 18-day uprising that ousted former President Hosni Mubarak,” while Morsi “announced nominal promotions for the general and other military […]

Russia’s economy looks to be running down to a crawl. The FT noted yesterday that Andrei Klepach, the deputy economy minister, has slashed growth forecasts to 2.5%, down from the previously expected rate of 3.6%. Earlier in the year, Prime Minister Medvedev had forecast 5% growth for the year.The indicators aren’t cooperating: GDP growth in the first quarter […]

Competitive devaluation is the order of the day. Japan, the EU, the US and China are all deliberately following policies that tend to weaken their currencies. The hope is that they will get a double boost: Easy money will stimulate investment at home while a cheap currency makes their exports attractive abroad and dampens domestic […]

Kansas’s experiment with Tea Party governance is uniting skeptics—both left and right. Tax experts in Washington, DC have joined non-Tea Party Republicans in the Kansas legislature in expressing concern that the tax reform signed into law by Governor Sam Brownback went way too far with its tax cuts. The bill, which slashes top income rates […]

Some states are friendlier to online education than others when it comes to credentialing and other regulations. This can be a problem for the more than 7 million students who are enrolled in online classes. Fortunately, there are proposals to mend this patchwork system. The New York Times reports on one of those proposals: A commission on […]

Representatives from ASEAN and China have agreed to talk about a code of conduct in the South China Sea, Indonesia Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told reporters today. That’s great news, especially because the meeting was China’s idea, according to Natalegawa. If true, this is a departure from Beijing’s usual stonewalling when it comes to working out […]

Two years after the US Supreme Court ruled that California prison conditions constituted “cruel and unusual punishment,” Governor Jerry Brown says his state has “one of the finest prison systems in the United States.” A district and a federal court disagreed this week, rejecting his requests to regain control of prisons from the federal judiciary and […]

The trial of Pennsylvania abortionist Kermit Gosnell, which started on March 18, has spawned a number of revelations—revelations for which the adjective “disturbing” hardly does justice. According to the Grand Jury report, Gosnell “regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy—and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors.” […]

According to the US agricultural attaché in Cairo, Egypt is overestimating by a third or more the yield from this year’s wheat crop. This matters because, first of all, Egypt is the world’s largest importer of wheat, a main food staple for Egyptians. Second, it matters because the government sets import and stockpiling policies based on […]

As Congress and student advocates debate the failings of federal student loans, one grad student may have discovered the fastest way to drive down student debt: living in a van.Newly liberated from his undergraduate debt and faced with paying over $10,000 for living expenses at grad school, Ken Ilgunas chose instead to turn his van […]