Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi is reportedly on the run from thousands of protesters who stormed the presidential palace in Cairo, Reuters reports: Officers fired teargas at up to 10,000 demonstrators angered by Mursi’s drive to hold a referendum on a new constitution on December 15. Some broke through police lines around his palace and protested […]

Hailed as the great success for moderation in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, Tunisia, the place where it all began, has been unsettled by a rise in violence due to a small but confident Salafi minority. The moderate Islamists running the country in a coalition with secular forces seem to be afraid to take […]

IBM’s Watson supercomputer is still best known for its appearance on Jeopardy! last year, but it and systems like it are already beginning to transform industries from medicine to finance.A new piece in the New York Times shows how computer systems that analyze a patient’s symptoms, medical records, and case history databases are already beginning to […]

In a desperate move to balance the budget, Californians opted to raise tax rates on top earners in the last election. Over the next few years, the state will be extracting $6 billion in new tax revenue from individuals and families earning more than $250,000 and $500,000 a year, respectively.The early budget outlook is positive; the […]

The New York Times offers some reasons why it isn’t. The debt burden and the opportunity cost in years of a college education are leading Gen Xers to rethink its value. Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg are modern role models for ambitious college dropouts, and programs like UnCollege are helping the young acquire skills and education […]

Correspondents and analysts seem to be on the verge of declaring the demise of Butcher Assad. It’s not looking good for his embattled regime: News reports quoted activists as saying fighting was raging in the southern suburbs of Damascus and near the international airport for a fifth straight day as government forces sought to dislodge […]

Pakistani religious radicals have found some new targets: septuagenarians, the dead, and Shiite minorities. The NYT has a harrowing report: For at least a year now, Sunni extremist gunmen have been methodically attacking members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shiite minority that emigrated here from Afghanistan more than a century ago. The killers strike […]

Mohamed El Baradei, the former chief of the IAEA and now a leader of Egypt’s liberals, warned in an FT op-ed that Egypt is on the brink of civil war: We are back in Tahrir Square. The situation is volatile: an Egypt bitterly divided between Islamists and the rest of the country, opening the door for […]

Brazil’s economy may be slowing down, but the cocaine business is thriving. Brazil is currently the second-largest market for cocaine in the world. As a result of this fact, Brazil’s government is borrowing a much reviled policy from America’s drug war: building an aggressive presence across the border to nab drug dealers before they enter […]

South Africa has fallen on hard times. Effectively ruled as a one-party state by the ANC and its controversial President Zuma, the most advanced economy in Africa is facing a host of deep-seated social and economic problems, of which the 34 striking miners shot dead by police are only the most striking example. And if this LA Times […]