The original Panama Canal was a revolution in geopolitics and economics; before it was built, the sea voyage was shorter from London to San Francisco than from New York to California, and the Caribbean was a strategic dead end that nobody in world politics cared much about.A generation of U.S. foreign policy involved extending power […]

The U.S. embassy in Beijing has been monitoring the air quality in the city since 2008. In November 2010, a State Department employee, startled when meter crept above 500—the very top of the EPA’s Air Quality Index standard—tweeted that the quality was ‘crazy bad’. Though the undiplomatic tweet was quickly removed, and the ‘crazy bad’ […]

Whenever a ‘must pass’ bill comes up in Congress, lobbyists and special interests move heaven and earth to attach their favorite items to it—and that’s happening in spades with the Sandy relief act. USA Today brings us some choice morsels from the sausage factory floor: A Senate-passed version from the end of the last Congress included […]

Yesterday we noted the distressing anti-immigrant policies in Greece that have led to violent treatment of foreigners. We’ve also noted how another stressed EU member – Hungary – has gone even further down the road of xenophobic extremism (see here, here, and here).But even by Hungarian standards things are getting ugly. The odious Zsolt Bayer, […]

The kids were getting rambunctious, so the grownups had to step in.They did, and the trillion dollar coin is dead. As Ezra Klein reports, the Treasury won’t make one and if it did the Fed wouldn’t accept it.The grownups understand what the kids don’t; money is serious business and playing silly mind games with the […]

It sounds like the basis for a James Bond movie: After a six years, forensic investigators puzzling over “anonymous” rifle cartridges in Africa have finally found the source of the munitions—Iran. C.J. Chivers has the story in the New York Times: Iran has a well-developed military manufacturing sector, but has not exported its weapons in quantities rivaling […]

Medical experts were shocked earlier this week when a new RAND study on electronic medical records found that the new technology has been much less successful in reducing health care costs than everyone originally predicted. But the RAND data tells part of the story, as another recent study published in the journal Health Affairs shows: […]

Blogger Doug Mataconis points to some statistics indicating that residents of Washington DC may watch more porn films on the internet than residents of any US state. Some social conservatives will view this with alarm, saying it is one more sign that America is turning into Sodom and the day of wrath is coming. Others […]

With the fiscal cliff fading into the past, attention is now turning to the next DC-generated crisis: the debt ceiling. This dispatch from left-leaning Washington Post blogger Greg Sargent on his  Plum Line blog suggests that the search for a Democrats-only solution to raise the ceiling in the Senate may be tough, and reading between the […]

Could Iran finally be ready for serious talks on its uranium enrichment program? A recent announcement by its lead nuclear negotiator indicates that it might be. But as always with Iran, words and actions aren’t necessarily aligned and Russia is worried that the Iranians aren’t ready to move.Laura Rozen reports at the Back Channel: Western diplomats fear […]