An old religious conflict is leaving town; a new one is moving in.For hundreds of years, religious differences in Europe between Protestants and Catholics led to persecution and war. That conflict isn’t quite over; in Northern Ireland violence between the two communities still sometimes breaks out. But in a sign of how much things have […]

The Russia Reset has failed. Add the New York Times to the list of papers writing eulogies for one of President Obama’s major first term foreign policy efforts. Though the outreach initiative did lead to some notable achievements—the signing of a nuclear arms control pact and the admission of Russia into the WTO, to name […]

Google’s Eric Schmidt has a new book coming out (co-authored by former State Department whiz-kid Jared Cohen), and it looks like it will be quite provocative. [Full disclosure: Schmidt is the chair of the New America Foundation, an organization WRM helped launch and on whose board he sits.] The Wall Street Journal has gotten an advance […]

The special feature in this week’s Economist focuses on something we highlighted here on the blog yesterday: the Nordic countries, long darlings of blue model partisans in the United States, have been aggressively experimenting and innovating their way to something that looks strikingly post-blue.Yet they’ve managed to pull it off without destroying the prospects for their […]

The Chinese are feeling their oats. Earlier this week, the New York Times reported that a Chinese management company is taking over control of a strategic deep sea port in Pakistan’s south-west. The fate of Gwadar, once billed as Pakistan’s answer to the bustling port city of Dubai, United Arab Emirates, has been a focus of […]

It’s a tale of two cities. These two remarkable pictures, sent in by a brave, hopefully still healthy VM reader, were taken just three days apart. The first was taken Tuesday morning, when Beijing’s Air Quality Index hit 517, exceeding the EPA’s upper limit of 500. Beijing’s air has been a toxic soup for the past […]

Mexico is fast becoming a North American success story, though you wouldn’t know it from the coverage the country gets from most news outlets. That coverage tends to light on things like the massive and still-unexplained explosion that occurred Thursday afternoon at the headquarters of Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned oil company. At least 32 people lost their lives […]

This week Patty Andrews, the last of the famous Andrews sisters singers, died at age 94 in Los Angeles. The three sisters—Maxene, Patty, and LaVerne—were in vogue during the 1940s and ’50s, and they are still remembered for catchy songs like “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B.” The BBC has more: The Andrews Sisters […]

Obamacare has just used a definitional trick to make health insurance unattainable for millions of Americans. The new healthcare law will provide tax credits to individuals who can’t afford insurance, but on Wednesday the IRS released a  definition of “affordable” that will leave many families in the lurch. The NYT has the story: In 2012, according […]

American colleges may be going broke faster than we thought. According to a recent New York Times report, investment returns on university endowments fell by 0.3 percent last year. This could be the beginning of a major funding crisis at many universities. “The long-term goal of most endowments is to exist in perpetuity and grow with […]