American universities may finally be catching up to Iran on LGBT rights. Our foe to the east offers state-funded sexual reassignment surgeries. Now Brown University’s student health insurance plan will also be picking up the tab for 14 different gender-shifting surgeries starting in August. The Brown Daily Herald reports: “We identified this as an important benefit for […]

The big news this morning is that Pope Benedict XVI says that he will resign by the end of February, the first pope to do so in just under 600 years. Read the official statement, courtesy of ABC News. The key passage: After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the […]

The next financial market meltdown may already be brewing: not in the housing market, this time, but in municipal bonds. Greedy bankers, opportunistic politicians and hobbled regulators are putting a time bomb in the muni market that could set off another devastating crash.California is leading the way.It is starting out innocently enough. Looking to expand […]

When Russia and China come up as subjects in the media and in political and academic discourse (as they frequently do), they are discussed in terms of bilateral relations, as a segue into a discussion of regional and global politics, as authoritarian threats to the West, or as examples of attempts at authoritarian modernization. Ever […]

I have had little to say about foreign policy so far, and that may seem odd for someone whose work over the years has been almost exclusively about foreign policy and national security-related topics. But the truth is that America’s deepest and most profound problems are now domestic in nature. There are no existential threats […]

This week we responded to Matt Yglesias’ eye-opening experiences with government red tape. The liberal columnist encountered the darker side of the blue model when he attempted to file for a single basic business license. This got us thinking again about the failures of Liberalism 4.0: Heavy regulation plus bad governance hurts the poor and prevents jobs from being […]

A US non-profit warned the UK more than four years ago that many British hospitals were doing a terrible job caring for patients, according to a report released in the aftermath of the Stafford Hospital scandal. The Telegraph reports the UK’s Department of Health asked the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, then run by Obama’s former healthcare […]

Car use is falling in Auckland, New Zealand, and city planners around the world should start paying attention: New Geography thinks this could be a sign of things to come: The prospect of falling car use now needs to be firmly factored into planning for western cities.That may come as a bit of a surprise in light […]

Every year, Foreign Policy and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto award the Lionel Gelber Prize for the year’s best foreign affairs book, and this year I’m one of the judges. They’ve just released the long list of titles in the running, which we’ve listed below with a link to their […]

France is now bombing the Sahara.When French and Malian forces captured the town of Kidal last week, Islamist militants lost control of the last major town in northern Mali. Yet the battle continues despite France’s success at capturing the cities as the militants have moved to the vast, empty mountains in the north. African and French […]