One of the hoped-for legacies of Barack Obama’s presidency was a reconciliation between the US and the Islamic world. This vision has suffered a series of setbacks, mostly due to the administration’s muddled policy decisions in the Middle East and Burma.Just to drive the point home, here’s a chart from a recent Pew survey that shows how Obama’s […]

California has released its first official numbers about the monthly premiums state residents will face under Obamacare, and they’re lower than anyone expected. The consulting firm Milliman, for example, estimated that middle-tier plans would, on average, cost Californians $450 per month without a subsidy. The state’s new numbers put that same plan at $276 per […]

Andrew Pickford wrote an interesting piece on Australia’s changing neighborhood for today’s Diplomat. Nations like the Solomon Islands, Papua New Guinea, and East Timor are small, sparsely populated, and marginal in Asian geopolitics (akin to the Caribbean, perhaps, in the western hemisphere). At the same time, however, they’re mostly poor and poorly governed, and unrest and instability […]

The Kremlin can hardly believe its luck these days. With the US dithering over Syria and the EU hopelessly lost, wandering in the ruins of its euro project, Russia is enjoying plum opportunities to reassert itself on the world stage.Case in point, Cyprus. Here’s the latest from OpenEurope’s morning news digest: The Cyprus Mail reports […]

President Obama wants to be rid of the Global War on Terror, but the Global War on Terror isn’t quite finished with him. For evidence, turn your gaze to Niger, the large, sparsely populated country on the southern edge of the Saharan desert.“A car bomb exploded at about 5.30am local time at an army base […]

Last night’s vote by the Boy Scouts of America to admit openly gay youth has at least one of the telling signs of a true compromise: everyone is unhappy with it. Despite the fact that both the Roman Catholics and Mormons threw their weight behind the measure, some religious families are upset and are threatening to […]

It’s a battle of the titans as fracking squares off against beer in Germany. The Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s beer purity law that’s been on the books for almost five hundred years, could kill the country’s hopes at extracting its shale resources. Der Spiegel reports on German brewers’ resistance to fracking for fear that it might contaminate the water used […]

The Syrian Civil War is looking every day more and more like the Civil War in Spain. Just as fascists, communists, and anarchists from all over Europe streamed into Spain, so Sunnis and Shiites are flocking to Syria.Sam Dagher reports for the Wall Street Journal: Shiite fighters, primarily from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, are now […]

After forty-plus years of absence, ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) is returning to the City University of New York. A very ugly exit in March of 1971, forced by immature, ill informed, and generally appalling student protests, kept the military segregated from CUNY, one of the most diverse universities in America, for entire generations.A moving […]

The NYC city council has just passed a resolution allowing religious groups to worship in public schools, taking a stand on a decades-old controversy. Since 1994, state legislators and activists with a radical interpretation of the First Amendment have been trying to evict New York City churches from public schools. The official New York City […]