Chicago’s teachers weren’t the only ones to end a strike this week: South Africa’s six-week mine protest finally came to an end on Tuesday when a group of protesting miners were promised a pay raise. And much like in America, the resolution of these strikes gives an embattled president new hope for reelection.Unfortunately, this isn’t […]

The strike may be over, but the problems for Chicago’s teachers are only beginning. The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund will go bankrupt in a few years if nothing is done. The New York Times reports: The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund has about $10 billion in assets, but is paying out more than $1 billion in benefits a […]

At the beginning of the euro crisis, many predicted Europe would be pushed into a closer union. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening: Europe is slowly fragmenting into a two-tiered structure with a safe, reliable core and a dangerous, floundering periphery. As depositors rush to withdraw their money from peripheral banks and put it […]

A French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, has published new cartoons featuring (what else?) depictions of the prophet Muhammad. Fearing violence at its embassies in the Muslim world, France has decided to preemptively close them. The Financial Times has more: Jean-Marc Ayrault, the prime minister, affirmed the right to freedom of expression but pointedly added his “disapproval […]

In Syria this week, witnesses reported that the Syrian army tested chemical weapons as recently as last month. Der Spiegel has the details: The tests took place near a chemical weapons research center at Safira east of Aleppo, witnesses told SPIEGEL. A total of five or six empty shells devised for delivering chemical agents were fired […]

If 2010 was the year of austerity, then 2012 may be remembered as the year of stimulus. The Fed made a major splash last week when it announced a nearly unlimited bond-buying program that is scheduled to continue well after unemployment falls. Earlier this month, the ECB announced a similar plan to tackle the issue of sovereign debt in […]

Good news from China this morning: not only does Mr. Xi’s health seem improved, so do U.S.-China relations.The future Chinese president’s comments that he hopes military-to-military relations will improve between the U.S. and China are a positive sign. Deepening cooperation between these two militaries is vital to improving trust and to reducing the chance that […]

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that the number of new mortgages fell 10 percent last year, hitting a new low not seen since 1995. Much of the decline is due to the more stringent lending standards banks have used since 2007: Banks have become much more cautious about making loans since the housing bust. The […]

WSJ: At least 10 Turkish soldiers were killed and more than 70 were wounded in a rocket attack by Kurdish militants in Turkey’s eastern province of Bingol, government officials said, in the latest of a series of brazen attacks on Turkey’s security forces that underline how the region’s three-decade-old conflict is deepening.A Turkish military convoy […]

Buried deep underneath the freezing Siberian tundra, an international team of scientists may have found mammoth fragments containing living cells of the extinct behemoth, the Associated Press reports: Russia’s North-Eastern Federal University said an international team of researchers had discovered mammoth hair, soft tissues and bone marrow some 328 feet (100 meters) underground during a […]