Was your Thanksgiving dinner yesterday organic? If so, you paid a premium for food that likely was no healthier for you and wasn’t better for the environment. Physician Henry Miller outlines the case for non-organic food over at Project Syndicate: A 2012 meta-analysis of data from 240 studies concluded that organic fruits and vegetables were, on average, no more […]

Thanksgiving day saw the NYT reeling in shock as yet another major Obamacare meltdown looms. One key way the Affordable Care Act was supposed to expand access to health insurance was through relaxing eligibility restrictions for Medicaid: the CBO predicted that nine million people will gain coverage through the Medicaid expansion this year alone.But there’s […]

 Reading and writing about the Syria crisis day-in and day-out largely in terms of geopolitics, it can be easy to lose sight of the grievous human toll extracted by this brutal conflict. Stories like this one, describing the plight Syrian refugee children living in Turkey, help correct that blind-spot: The biggest ethnic group among those […]

Israel’s thriving science and technology sector looked to be shut out of a massive $95 billion EU-funded grants program starting next year, due to EU restrictions on funding going to organizations with a presence in the West Bank. Members of Netanyahu’s coalition dug their heels in over the EU’s demands earlier this summer, and talks […]

It’s a bittersweet Thanksgiving for the Meads this year; it is our first holiday without Mom at the table. We are endlessly grateful for the years she shared with us; we still don’t quite know how to live and to celebrate without her and at some level I still can’t quite believe that she’s gone.But […]

South Korea has joined Japan in kicking sand in China’s face: “Even since China has created this airspace defence zone, we have continued our surveillance activities as before in the East China Sea, including in the zone,” said Japan’s top government spokesman, Yoshihide Suga.“We are not going to change this [activity] out of consideration to […]

How the mighty have fallen! Silvio Berlusconi has been kicked out of the Italian parliament, thereby losing his immunity from prosecution for several outstanding charges he’s facing. The BBC: Ahead of the vote, he vowed to remain in politics to lead his Forza Italia in a “fight for the good of Italy”. A defiant Berlusconi […]

Air Defense Identification Zones like the one China set up in the East China Sea last weekend are common features of national defense. Many countries have them, including the US, Japan, and South Korea. But China’s ADIZ goes beyond the norm. The Lowy Institute’s Rory Medcalf explains how: If China’s new zone did not include disputed […]

In May of last year, Argentina’s President Cristina Fernández took control of the Argentinian oil company YPF by expropriating shares from the Spanish oil major Repsol. Now, more than a year and a half later, Fernández is offering to pay Repsol $5 billion for the expropriated shares. That’s less than half of what Repsol was seeking, but […]

Despite a largely successful protest that drew thousands in the northwestern regional capital of Peshawar, Imran Khan and his party, the PTI, are becoming increasingly isolated. Khan’s insistence on the cessation of American drone strikes as the cornerstone of his domestic policy is alienating all sections of Pakistan’s political establishment, including his allies. JUI-F, a […]