Since Shinzo Abe entered office, Japan and South Korea haven’t gotten along. His administration’s nationalism and hawkishness, as well as its apparent blindness to the suffering of Japan’s colonial subjects in the past century, have certainly taken a toll on the official relationship. The clearest sign that all was not warm and fuzzy was new […]

The AFL-CIO, the biggest alliance of labor unions in America, is feeling feeble these days. You can tell because lately it’s been trying to regain some of its old clout by partnering with non-labor progressive groups, effectively bringing millions of non-union members into the fold. The problem is that some of the unions under the […]

When Obama was campaigning on behalf of his health care law one mantra was repeated ad nauseam: If you like your current plan, you can keep it. To put it gently, this hasn’t turned out to be the case, as more and more employers are opting to drop health coverage for their employees, pushing them onto […]

The Sacramento Bee got its hands on 14 years of pension data from CalPERS and did some analysis. What it found should both surprise no one and cause outrage at the same time: on average, payout to new retirees in California doubled between 1999 and 2012, with police and firefighter pensions almost tripling in that period.Even […]

Thanks to fracking, the US has plenty of cheap natural gas. In fact, it has so much that it’s now planning the construction of new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facilities (just last decade the US was looking to build more LNG import infrastructure). Last month, the Obama administration approved plans for America’s third LNG […]

As a new wave of students began their college careers this week, we republished (and retweaked) an essay written three years ago with some advice for first years looking to get the most out of college. Here’s a selection from one of the seven tips offered up: Get a traditional liberal education; it is the […]

SEPTEMBER 5: Russia’s President Vladimir Putin welcomes US President Barack Obama at the start of the G20 summit in Saint Petersburg. Russia hosts the G20 summit hoping to push forward an agenda to stimulate growth but with world leaders distracted by divisions on the prospect of US-led military action in Syria. Image courtesy of Getty […]

There’s a tough issue that humanitarian interventionists need to take into account when it comes to Syria. There is really no good way to read the Constitution that gives the president an unlimited unilateral power to order US forces into combat for humanitarian missions, and it is even harder to find justification for a unilateral […]

The story ends on a leafy side street in northern Virginia, but it began with a killing machine in Auschwitz. The Washington Post magazine has a great Sunday read this week: Brigitte Höss lives quietly on a leafy side street in Northern Virginia. She is retired now, having worked in a Washington fashion salon for more […]

Fears of insurgency are spreading in Egypt. After Thursday’s failed car-bomb assassination attempt on him, the country’s foreign minister Mohamed Ibrahim ominously predicted that the attack was “not the end but the beginning.” That vague warning echoes a growing fear that Egypt is once again heading towards a protracted fight against Islamic insurgency forces. The FT reports: […]