Far and away the most surprising part of Obama’s climate change speech yesterday was the bit about the Keystone pipeline. The speech was about adapting to and mitigating climate change, and few expected the President to touch on what may be the hottest hot-button green issue going right now—the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would […]

It was Gay Marriage Day in Washington today with two Supreme Court decisions on the issue. In United States v. Windsor, the Court struck down the provision of the Defense of Marriage Act that defined marriage as being between a man and a woman. For the purposes of federal law and benefits, legally married same-sex couples will now […]

Seemingly every day brings news about how poorly we understand our climate, and yet global leaders seem more determined than ever to tackle the problem with game plans drawn up using yesterday’s facts. China began rolling out its first carbon cap-and-trade scheme last week, and yesterday President Obama announced a series of executive orders, collectively called […]

Susan Rice gave her last news conference at the UN before starting her new job as National Security Advisor yesterday, calling the West’s inaction in Syria “a moral and strategic disgrace that history will judge harshly.”Susan Rice is well known as an architect of the “humanitarian intervention” in Libya, and after the Rwandan genocide she famously […]

Moody’s, the credit rating agency, is setting itself up as an unlikely arbiter of massively open online courseware. A report from Moody’s Investors Service makes bullish predictions for schools that are early adopters of MOOCs, noting that successful programs will allow schools to spread their brand globally, potentially opening them up to a much wider range […]

The US moved back to the top spot on a list of the best places for foreign direct investment, according to the consulting firm A.T. Kearney. In its annual survey of more than 300 executives at companies worldwide, the US narrowly beat out China, which was previously number one.Other countries on the top ten list are […]

Employers ought to be scrambling to put telework policies in place, if two new studies are to be believed. The first study, conducting by a design firm, found that the modern office—characterized by an open floor plan often filled with cubicles—makes it harder for employees to concentrate. The WSJ reports on some solutions posed by the study’s […]

Australia’s Kevin Rudd is evidently a believer in that old Klingon proverb about revenge being a dish best served cold. It is very cold in Australia, and Rudd is once again the head of the Australian Labor Party at the expense of Julia Gillard, his former protege who ousted him in 2010. Facing the prospects […]

After Nawaz Sharif secured an unprecedented third term as Prime Minister of Pakistan, it didn’t take long for him to reach out to India, promising to “progressively pursue normalcy.” Late last week the Indian foreign office said Sharif had delivered “good signals” thus far into his term. Yet many Indians and Western analysts question whether […]

Former Japanese Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, who stepped down in 2010, just told a Hong Kong television station that the Senkaku Islands belong to China.“Hatoyama said it was unavoidable that China would state that Japan stole the uninhabited islets in the East China Sea,” reports the Japan Times. “Hatoyama said he thinks the Senkakus are implied in […]