Thanks to a spate of reforms, Myanmar is hosting the 2013 the World Economic Forum on East Asia, which begins today. Burma’s position as host highlights how quickly it has been brought into the good graces of the international community and the West; only two years ago, it was an international pariah.Burma’s democratic revolution, however, still coexists […]

When Edward Morse talks, the energy world listens. In February, the Citigroup commodities guru made waves in the energy community when he predicted the combined  US and Canadian oil supplies would outstrip demand in five years, in large part because of the American shale revolution.He’s still bullish on shale’s transformative power; in fact, he’s taking it to […]

Today brought more discouraging news from Egypt, where a criminal court convicted 43 local and foreign NGO employees of spreading unrest in the country. The groups, which include the congressionally funded International Republican Institute and National Democratic Institute, have had their assets seized by the Egyptian government. The vast majority of foreign aid workers, including […]

President Obama is shaking up his national security team: Tom Donilon is out, Susan Rice and Samantha Power are in. Mark Landler has a good story in the Times; we have four points in particular to note about this development.First, President Obama is now playing the national security game with his people. In his first term he […]

One of America’s closest allies claims to have unimpeachable evidence that President Obama’s “red line” in Syria has been crossed…several times. The FT reports that France has examined samples obtained from a Damascus suburb and from Saraqeb in the north, and concluded beyond any shred of doubt that the regime has targeted rebel forces with […]

The IMF’s growth forecast for Germany has just been cut in half due to troubles created by failing countries in the EU—not that the forecast was all that spectacular to begin with. In April, the IMF had predicted that the German economy would grow by 0.6 percent this year, but that already meager number is now down […]

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo seems to understand these days that the blue social model is a recipe for economic decline. The FT reports that he has proposed making certain locations in upstate New York and elsewhere “tax-free” to boost the state’s lagging economy. Upstate New York in particular has fallen behind New York City, […]

In November 2011, we ran a story about a pair of teen rowers from Episcopal Academy in suburban Philadelphia who gave up a race in order to stick around a rival boat whose rowers had fallen into the water. The two young men stayed until the others were safe and then rowed on to finish the […]

President Obama signed an executive order yesterday to levy a ninth round of sanctions on Iran, this time on the country’s currency and auto sector. The stated goal is to render the Iranian rial “unusuable” outside of Iran and to bring the country’s car industry to a grinding halt. But while the targets of these […]

Brussels often seems to busy itself with matters silly and bizarre, but the European Commission may finally be taking action on a worthwhile goal: fixing the EU’s broken and destructive fisheries policy. European subsidies for fishermen have frequently found their ways into the pockets of those caught illegally depleting stocks to dangerous, unsustainable levels. The FT reports […]