The latest news out of Italy is that Silvio Berlusconi has been shown out the Senate door after he failed to rally his party to leave Enrico Letta’s coalition government. It’s not a final verdict, but the full Senate is unlikely to overturn the ruling of the special committee that ruled that he should go. WRM, […]

The BRICs have had a rough year, but none has fallen quite so far as Brazil. After a few years in which it seemed poised to set the world on fire, economic growth is now below 1 percent, riots broke out across the country earlier this year, and the optimism of the Lula era is […]

We mentioned before how the blunders of the Obama administration’s Middle East policies would alienate our closest allies in the Arab world, Saudi Arabia. The proof is in the pudding: The NYT reports that the Saudis passed on their turn to speak at the UN General Assembly this week: They said it was the first time that the […]

Saim Saeed, WRM’s student not so long ago and currently Via Meadia’s man in Pakistan, has an excellent piece today in The News that takes aim at the mindset—all too prevalent among Western policymakers but also fashionable among Pakistan’s elites—that the resolution of Pakistan’s long-running conflict with India is a simple matter of transcending differences: There are […]

The biggest winner of the shutdown may be the Affordable Care Act. We wrote yesterday that reporters were having trouble tracking down a single person who had signed up for Obamacare on the federal exchanges. We’re happy to report that’s no longer the case: there are at least a handful now. As far as we know, the […]

In a bit of bright news for America’s energy future, the southern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline will be completed by the end of this month, connecting Cushing, Oklahoma with refineries along the Gulf Coast. The pipeline will bust open one of the bigger bottlenecks in America’s energy pipelines, allowing 700,000 barrels of […]

While most Obamacare news is still about the predictable glitches in the online systems, the other day the NYT led with a story on the the millions of low-income America’s who won’t be insured under the ACA. The reason for this coverage gap is the refusal of many red states to expand Medicaid: Because they live […]

There seem to be two realities of the India-Pakistan conflict. There’s the one in which the Prime Ministers of each country met in New York, shook hands, called for a peaceful resolution to their conflict, and lamented the arms race that has been going on since both countries’ inceptions in 1947. Then there’s the other […]

We’ve devoted ample time on this blog to the cities and states who have grossly mismanaged their pension plans, and for good reason: there are far too many of them. But while the big messes get all the press, there are some cities that have been doing it right. They deserve a shout-out once in […]

In May of this year James McCormick was convicted of selling fake bomb detectors to a number of countries, including Iraq, Belgium, Niger and Saudi Arabia. The devices, sold for $42,000, employ roughly the same technology as a golf ball finder and do nothing at all to detect bombs.  But even though they’re known to […]