Last Friday, Ukraine halted all imports of Russian natural gas. Kiev is preparing itself for a groundbreaking vote later this month to enter a free trade and association agreement with the EU, marking an historic shift away from its former Soviet master. In that context, the decision to cut ties with Russia’s Gazprom seemed especially […]

“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future,” said Hannah Arendt, “making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.” It seems everywhere you look in California, cities are finding out just how impossible that has become. Desert Hot Springs, a resort town of 26,000 residents, is set to […]

The media love affair with Pope Francis is apparently only part of a broader phenomenon: a new survey has found that he is the “most talked about person on the planet.” CNN: More folks have been chatting about the popular new pontiff online this year than Edward Snowden, Kate Middleton or even the Internet’s favorite bad […]

The crisis in law schools has been going on for a while now, but we didn’t realize it was this bad already: one observer estimates that over 80 percent of all law schools are operating at a loss.After obtaining the budgets from 31 law schools, including a mix of public and private institutions, Law Professor Paul […]

In what can only be described as a Freudian slip, Pakistan’s leading daily newspaper Dawn mistakenly referred to Hakimullah Mehsud, the newly-anointed leader of the Pakistani Taliban (abbreviated as TTP), as “the ruthless PTI leader” on their front page—a reference to the party of cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan. Khan, often criticized for being a Taliban […]

Obama’s mercurial policy on Syria has already alienated of two of our key allies in the Middle East, and now it’s having a similar effect on our allies in Europe. A new piece in the WSJ reports that some senior officials in Europe are beginning to doubt the President’s resilience toward Iran: Mr. Obama has also described […]

At the beginning of the month, we noted that the botched Obamacare rollout hadn’t yet started to make the law unpopular. That’s no longer the case, to put it gently. The most recent Quinnipiac poll is full of stark numbers for the Obama administration. For starters, 55 percent of respondents now oppose Obamacare, compared to […]

Wikileaks got its hands on a draft of the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, and it appears to vindicate many of the fears of internet freedom advocates. As the Sydney Morning Herald reports, the agreement will greatly help “multinational movie and music industries, software giants and pharmaceutical manufacturers to maintain and increase prices by reinforcing the rights […]

America’s energy future has never looked brighter. That’s one general take-away of the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) World Energy Outlook, released yesterday, which describes a global energy mix in the midst of great upheaval. But underlying all the uncertainty over what comes next is the undeniable fact that the United States is better positioned than […]

Bill Clinton is making waves with his comments that President Obama should honor his “like it, keep it” promise, even if it means changing the Affordable Care Act. Clinton isn’t only the one saying this: Democrats nervous about the future of the law have been increasingly taking this line over the last week. But Clinton […]