Syria’s Kurds once waged a fruitless struggle with Damascus against discrimination and for basic rights like citizenship and official recognition of a distinct Kurdish language and culture. Now, however, the equation has changed, and large chunks of northeastern Syria are now under the sole control of the Kurds.Back in July, Butcher Assad ceded the responsibility […]

Over at City Journal, Michael Totten chronicles the recent history of intimidation and violence perpetrated against so-called blasphemers and apostates by radical Muslims who feel insulted. By forcing Americans to hold their tongues due for fear of violent repercussions, Islamic terrorists have effectively eroded the free speech rights of Americans.Via Meadia has been keeping track of […]

The trap is closing in on the popular ousted princeling and neo-Maoist Bo Xilai. Bo’s wife, Gu Kailai, was sentenced to a suspended death penalty last month after confessing to the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood. Now, Bo’s former police chief Wang Lijun has been sentenced to 15 years in jail for abuse of […]

One of many alarming statistics in American healthcare is the number of patients who die due to medical mistakes. According to the Wall Street Journal, medical error is the sixth leading cause of death in America, ahead of Alzheimers, even. As Mark Makary argues, many of the problems stem from a lack of accountability in […]

WRM appeared on a panel at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College over the weekend, titled “Does Our Political and Constitutional System Make It Impossible for a President to Lead?” It was Bard’s fifth annual international conference, which focused this year on international geopolitics in an age of American political […]

The press has been kind to the Obama administration during its travails in the Middle East, kinder than it might have been if the president were a Republican. That may finally be changing—and it only took a fiasco of epic proportions to do it.Consider a prominent piece that ran in the Times on Sunday that investigates […]

Mamata Banerjee, who some people call India’s Sarah Palin, jumped on Facebook today to exhort her loyal followers to rally in Delhi next week in protest of India’s recent economic reforms. Mamata is new to the opposition, having withdrawn her party’s ministers from the governing coalition late last week.As chief minister of West Bengal and […]

The Obama administration has seen its share of major scandals as it approaches the end of its first term, but by far the biggest has been the Solyndra debacle, where the White House rushed over $500 million to a struggling but politically well connected solar company whose eminently predictable collapse left taxpayers holding the bag.It’s […]

We’ve written before how Russia is likely to be among the biggest losers of the Energy Revolution now firmly underway. An article in the Washington Post about the Russian giant Gazprom shows just how it is losing: Neither at home nor abroad does the company appear to have a competitive answer to the dramatic decline in gas […]

A new week, a new stage in the island battle simmering in the East China Sea: Japan’s prime minister looks likely to give the cold shoulder to a proposed Chinese free-trade pact, favoring one with the U.S. instead. The WSJ has the story: Lawmakers of the ruling Democratic Party of Japan expect Mr. Noda to […]