I said in a recent post that juxtaposition can sometimes qualify as serendipity. It’s now just happened again.Last week I got a letter from my doctor of the past dozen years informing me that he was changing his practice’s modus operandi.  He’s joining some new group that offers direct email and telephone access to patients, […]

The New York Times has some good news and some bad news for Obamacare. The good news is that, as many had predicted, health insurance costs will indeed be lower than initially projected (although this does not mean that they will be lower than they are now). The bad news is that many insurers are achieving this […]

The French are calling President Obama Carteresque—and they don’t mean it as a compliment: Carter was a somewhat bland engineer, whereas Obama is a charismatic lawyer. Yet they seem to share a fundamental indecisiveness in their approach to world affairs. Carter had difficulty choosing between the muscular line of his national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, […]

In the weekend  newspapers one can find obituaries for “Rabbi Philip Berg”, dead at 86. The New York Times obit headline credits Berg as follows: “Updated Jewish Mysticism.”“Updated”, huh? Well, that’s one way to describe the shenanigans of the huckster who “ministered” all the way to the bank to the likes of Madonna, Demi Moore, […]

Earlier this week, the staff posted a notice on the blog that my mother’s life was nearing its end. She breathed her last around 11 PM on September 16; since then the family has been caught up in the grief and the business of a heavy loss. We held her funeral on Friday and committed […]

In news this week from Asia, China unveiled two new plans to combat its pollution problem, one involving tax credits for electric vehicles, and the other a commitment to name-and-shame its worst-polluting megacities. A large part of the smog hovering over China’s countryside comes from burning coal; China has aggressively looked to diversify its energy […]

Adam Garfinkle has another excellent essay up on where the roller-coaster that is the Obama administration’s Syria policy is at right now. He wonders aloud whether the uptick in reports of back-channel dialogue between Washington and Tehran has anything to do with President Obama’s series of swift pivots on whether to punish Assad for his […]

Members of a Kurdish Peshmerga battalion show their ink-stained fingers in front of an insignia after voting in the region’s legislative elections at a polling station on September 19, 2013 in the northern Kurdish city of Arbil. Iraq’s Kurdistan, a three-province autonomous region, goes to the polls on September 21, grappling with a swathe of […]

Yet another horrific religiously-motivated massacre occurred this Sunday, this time in Pakistan. The New York Times: The attack occurred as worshipers left the All Saints Church in the old quarter of the regional capital, Peshawar, after a service on Sunday morning. Up to 600 worshipers had attended the service and were leaving to receive free food […]

It was hailed at the time as Norway’s “moon landing,” but Oslo’s outgoing government announced its plan to scrap a carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility. Reuters reports: The plan had been to capture carbon emissions from a natural gas plant at the site, which also hosts an oil refinery, and pipe them into underground storage on […]