In an age of declining revenue and readership for newspapers it is interesting that a battle is shaping up between the left- and right-leaning zillionaires for control of the Tribune Media group of eight newspapers including the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Orlando Sentinel, and others.The New York Times quotes the usual media enthusiasts […]

Azadi stadium in Tehran can hold 100,000 people, but barely half the seats were filled when Iran’s president Ahmadinejad hosted a rally there on Thursday. The president, who will step down after elections in June, gave a rousing speech in support of his chosen successor, but by the end of the three-hour event only a […]

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy is under investigation by a Paris prosecutor over allegations that his first presidential campaign was partially funded by Libyan dicator Muammer Gaddafi. Sarkozy denounced these allegations when they emerged last year, but the French government opted to open an official investigation after a businessman with connections in both countries backed […]

Is the PC market collapsing? Global shipments of PCs are down almost 14 percent over last year, the biggest drop since market-research firm IDC started tracking the data in 1994. And, as the WSJ reports, a private-equity firm has withdrawn a bid for the PC-maker Dell: [Private-equity firm] Blackstone on Thursday told a special Dell board committee […]

More than 100 people are dead after a powerful earthquake struck a mountainous province in China this morning, in a disturbing echo of the 2008 earthquake that killed nearly 70,000 people in the same region. In the aftermath of that 2008 quake, the country was horrified both by revelations of shoddy school construction (schoolchildren were […]

Clouds over Europe’s future grew a little darker yesterday. Italy is still without a new head of state as an effort to have former Prime Minister Romano Prodi elected failed miserably after 100 left-wing delegates refused to vote for the center-left politician. His defeat has thrown the Italian left into chaos, and ensured that the […]

Despite its recent victories in national elections, the Democratic Party is standing on shaky ground. For years, the coalition of minority voters, labor unions, working-class whites and affluent, college-educated liberals has held together despite its inherent contradictions, but we’re now seeing signs that it is beginning to come apart. In what we’ve dubbed the “blue […]

When confronted by a belligerent, nuclear-armed North Korea, America’s goal is not just to try to reduce the prospect of war on the Korean peninsula. Washington also must calm nerves across the region, especially in Tokyo and Seoul. If the US fails to get North Korea behaving properly, Japan and South Korea, among others, start to edge […]

The shale boom and the rise of gas are doing more to help the environment than all the green handwringing in the world. New estimates from the Energy Information Administration found that America’s carbon dioxide emissions dropped 12 percent from 2005 to 2012. Many attribute this drop to both the recession and the shift from […]

AI Editor Adam Garfinkle has a must-read on the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Those uninformed about the significance of the uprising and its vital connection to Jewish Holocaust and Heroism Remembrance Day will learn a lot from the piece. He points out that many Jews were unwilling to commemorate the Holocaust until the testimony of […]