How do you repay your only friend in the world? If you’re North Korea, you spend the last few weeks acting like a deranged James Bond villain fingering the red button on a doomsday device, threatening to set off a regional war unless your demands are met, and leaving your ally China, already fairly isolated […]

In a real man-bites-dog story, an EU country with an economy that has expanded by almost a fifth since 2008 has opted to boost its military procurement in the coming decade by $43 billion. The country in question is Poland, the FT reports: Until now, most of that spending has gone on personnel, with only […]

This week’s essay focused on America’s jobs problem, and outlined why work is an essential human right: When thinking about the future of jobs during the Information Revolution, it’s important to remember that the drive to work is embedded in human nature rather than in economic scarcity. Human beings don’t just work because they want […]

The US shale boom, as Polemarchus might have said, is helping friends and harming enemies. Shale gas from America has become an important asset for Japan’s economic recovery; the country is an ally poor in natural resources and struggling with soaring fuel costs in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports from the […]

Public employee unions have a new international villain to add to their growing list: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi’s government is embarking on a fight to break the monopolizing power of Israel’s formidable port unions, the “gatekeepers for Israel’s international commerce,” that would make Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker and Mexican President Enrique Nieto welcome […]

Filipino police shot a 65-year old Taiwanese fisherman in the neck a few days ago in the latest dispute to heat up the South China Sea. Things escalated quickly after the “accident” and now two American allies are at each other’s throats.The Philippines apologized twice for the “accident,” in which the coast guard riddled the fisherman’s […]

Flame-resistant overalls are the latest reason to be optimistic about America’s future. The US shale boom is creating plenty of new jobs in the oil and gas industry, but it’s having a number of knock-on effects as well. Energy-intensive industries have been bolstered by the influx of cheap natural gas, for example. And a new […]

Egyptians are increasingly dissatisfied about their country’s economy and pessimistic about their collective future, according to a new poll by Pew. 62 percent of those polled are unhappy with the way the country is going, up from 41 percent last year, and 34 percent the year before. The current level of public dissatisfaction is close […]

Sufi Islam—more mystical, more concerned with God’s love than God’s law, and much more tolerant toward other faiths and other varieties of Islam—has been on the retreat in much of the Islamic world. Saudi-funded Wahabi preachers and Islamist activists have put Sufism on the defensive and in some cases (as in Mali) have attacked and […]

Readers trying to understand how Obamacare will transform our health care system should look to Switzerland. Bloomberg profiles the Swiss health care system, which is perhaps the closest global equivalent to what our health care market will become under the ACA.Like Obamacare, the Swiss system does not use a single-payer system or offer a public option, but rather […]