As if the Tea Party/IRS mess isn’t enough, the White House has been shaken to its foundations by a series of dramatic and devastating revelations about the unsuspected reach of the government’s surveillance of the telephone records, email and other activities of US citizens without their knowledge. The President’s liberal base is stunned and appalled, […]

The IMF on Thursday officially released a classified internal report on the Greek bailout after its contents were leaked to the WSJ. The report admits that the IMF misjudged “by a large margin” the sustainability of Greek debt. It also says that Greece’s debt problems were so bad that the IMF had to fudge the numbers so […]

Noah Berlatsky argues over at The Atlantic that sexism is alive and well in divorce court, and that the chief victims are men.He scores some good points. Decades ago, family structures were such that most men went to work and most women tended the home, partly because open discrimination against women in the workplace was widely […]

America’s trillion-dollar student debt burden is killing small business creation, according to Bloomberg. From 2005 to 2010 self-employment for those 25 and younger fell by 19 percent; 23 percent of respondents to one survey stated that debt problems had put their small business plans on hold. The Bloomberg story discusses the case of Dr. Steve Sherick, who’s […]

The Guardian scored a major scoop today by revealing that the Obama administration secretly ordered Verizon to turn over all records of phone calls made through its Business Network Services division. In effect, this means that the call logs, which include information on numbers dialed, the length of calls and the locations (but not the content of […]

Lithuania is the latest European country to wriggle out of the grip of Russia’s state-owned gas behemoth Gazprom. The Russian energy giant has a 37 percent stake in Lithuania’s national gas utility, but the former Soviet state is taking advantage of a new EU rule to restructure this arrangement and nationalize its pipelines.The EU requires […]

Disapproval of Obamacare has hit a new high at perhaps the worst possible time. WSJ reports that 49 percent of Americans now believe the ACA was a “bad idea,” compared to almost 40 percent in 2011. Even more interesting, 43 percent of Americans hold “strongly” to their opposition to the law, which is an unusually low margin between […]

The “big news” in U.S. foreign policy today, of course, is what is being called the personnel shakeup: Tom Donilon out as NSC Advisor, Susan Rice in from her UN post, and Samantha Power from the NSC staff to Turtle Bay. This is the kind of story the mainstream press can’t get enough of, because […]

China’s enthusiasm for computerized mayhem isn’t restricted to the virtual. Earlier this week, a Russian IT security firm released a report naming “Red Star” as a China-based hacking crew suspected to have ties to official Beijing (though no links are proven yet). The group has taken advantage of faults in Microsoft Office software to spread NetTraveler, […]

The nationalist, party-owned newspaper Global Times recently launched an online video game called “Recover the Diayou Islands” that allows players to fight against Japanese ships and planes and invade Japanese territory. (You can play the game here.)Dramatic music plays in the background. “The Chinese nation’s determination to protect the Diaoyu Islands is unwavering!” reads the game’s introduction, according […]