It’s already been a banner week for high-profile flameouts, but we may now have a winner for worst of the lot. NY Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, a Democrat, used more than $100,000 in public money to hush up sexual harassment charges against Democratic Assemblyman Vito Lopez. The New York Times reports: Mr. Lopez, 71, was censured […]

The Middle East continues its thousand-year-old tradition of sectarian division. Many worried that Egypt’s decision to attend the Non-Aligned Movement meeting in Iran could be a sign that anti-Americanism was trumping sectarian rivalry, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. Rather, Egypt’s President Morsi apparently went to Iran to berate the Shiites and schismatics […]

Although the economy will be far and away the deciding factor in the upcoming election, this does not mean that other issues will be ignored. The Romney camp is already preparing attacks on Obama’s record on foreign policy, and this week, the two campaigns have been trading barbs over education—specifically, the role of the private […]

Japan and North Korea are holding their first official face-to-face discussions in four years, according to the BBC. (The two countries currently have no diplomatic relations.) Is this a sign of a friendly future, or will North Korea once again, like Lucy, snatch the football away?For Japan, there is no downside to testing whether North Korea is […]

After much backroom wrangling, the contents of Governor Jerry Brown’s much-touted California pension reform bill have finally been made public just a few days before the vote at the end of the week. As we predicted when we last heard about the bill, the final product contains a few steps in the right direction, but […]

A court in Georgia has heard how four self-described “anarchist” U.S. soldiers planned to kill President Obama and overthrow the U.S. government. The group is on trial in civilian court for a separate incident: the alleged murder of a fellow officer and his girlfriend, who knew about the group’s activities and was killed because, in the […]

Here’s some more evidence that the U.S. economy has a bright outlook in the long term: The Wall Street Journal reports that jobs that once moved to Asia are now returning to the United States.While the outsourcing of back-office and call center work to Asia is likely to continue, many companies are looking to source more […]

A recent BBC piece on the decay and squalor of the Gaza Strip nicely illustrates the bizarre bias in so much media coverage of Palestinian issues. Despite reports in Arab and Israeli media suggesting that Egyptian forces are destroying smuggling tunnels into Gaza, and despite Egypt’s continued refusal to open its border with Gaza, the BBC […]

Andrew Sullivan may have hauled down the flag on the circumcision issue, acknowledging that respect for religious freedom requires allowing both Muslims and Jews to perform essential required rites of their respective faiths, but he’s taken up another unlikely cause: that people should support President Obama because he is really the ‘best’ kind of British […]

So far, foreign policy has been almost wholly absent from the presidential race. The Wall Street Journal thinks this is about to change. Following the convention in Tampa, the Romney camp is reportedly preparing a series of speeches and events to highlight its criticisms of the Obama administration’s foreign policies.This case will be difficult to […]