Tonight I’ll be up at Bard with a group of students from the Manor and Upper Manor residence halls as the election returns come in. I’ll be blogging and tweeting until it looks as if there’s a winner — or it looks as if we’re going to bed without knowing who won. Readers can follow […]

California has had a rough go of it lately. Its cities are going bankrupt up and down the state, and the ones that aren’t are being crushed by pension burdens. Meanwhile, its politicians seem more concerned with expensive vanity projects than with fixing the destructive policies that threaten to wreck the state.This may all be about to change […]

A police officer was killed and eleven other people were injured in a grenade attack on a church in a police compound in Kenya. As the BBC reports, most of those injured were police officers.The attack is the latest in a series that has been blamed on the Somalian militant group al-Shabab. The strikes are believed to […]

Many businesses anticipate that Obamacare will deal a blow to their bottom line in the form of fines and penalties. Some are now planning to evade the law’s fine for uninsured full-time employees by  pushing full-time employees to part-time status. The Wall Street Journal reports: Several restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to […]

The split between the two Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas is deepening as more Middle Eastern governments turn to support Hamas. Last week the emir of Qatar made waves with a visit to Gaza, and now Turkish Prime Minister plans to follow suit. The New York Times reports: A visit by the leader of Turkey, a huge […]

The past few days in Syria have been particularly bloody and destructive, Reuters reports: An Islamist suicide car bomber killed at least 50 Syrian security men in Hama province on Monday, an opposition group said, in what would be one of the bloodiest single attacks on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in a 20-month-old uprising.Syrian government […]

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg concentrated on monitoring soda sizes in the months before Hurricane Sandy turned large stretches of his city into dark and freezing refugee camps.At least one city in California shares the mayor’s sense of what matters. The New York Times reports that Richmond, California is now preparing to become the first city […]

Though the US dominates the world of unmanned aerial vehicles, both armed and spy-types, other countries are fast catching up. Especially in Asia, the Global Post reports: In the Asia-Pacific region, the list of countries who have developed or purchased drones already includes Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand […]

The UK has always had an uneasy relationship with its neighbors across the English Channel, and this very much includes the European Union, which has aroused skepticism in London from the beginning. But some have been more skeptical than others. In general, Labour has been a relatively enthusiastic EU party, while the Tories are more […]

News from North Africa has been almost uniformly bad since the heyday of the Arab Spring. The messy Libya mission, the chaos in northern Mali, and the rise of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as a potent terrorist force have been the biggest stories of the past year, and all suggest that radical Islam is spreading […]