Two steps forward, one step back in Europe: after the German parliament rebuked a Cologne court’s decision to ban circumcision in Germany, an Austrian province went ahead and banned the practice. The provincial governor, Markus Wallner, said he had halted circumcisions until Austria formulated a uniform approach to the practice, a religious duty for Muslims and Jews. […]

Fellow AI blogger Peter Berger is always a stimulating read. This week, he tackled the anti-obesity movement as embodied in Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on sales of large sodas in New York City. Peter has studied how the anti-tobacco movement gained legitimacy and finally succeeded in its goals beyond its wildest dreams, and finds many parallels in […]

Earlier this week, the BBC reported on an ultraconservative Salafi MP who has been found to have strayed from the light: Police officers told the Misdemeanour Court in Tukh, outside Cairo, that they had found Mr Wanis caressing a fully-veiled woman student who was sitting on his lap in his car while it was parked on […]

The dust has settled: According to the Wall Street Journal, Viacom and DirecTV have declared a truce in their contract standoff, meaning DirecTV viewers can now go back to watching their SpongeBob, Daily Show, and Colbert Report. The seven-year agreement, worth hundreds of millions of dollars, was reached after DirectTV instituted a nine-day blackout of Viacom […]

Over a series of recent posts, I’ve been looking at the energy revolution that is changing the look of the 21st centuries. Some countries are losers, but the US in particular stands to make big gains at home and in its foreign policy.On the whole, this news is about as good as it gets: trillions […]

The good folk over at the Lowy Interpreter blog have released a short, five-minute primer on the rising tensions in the South China Sea:The video is narrated by Michael Wesley, Executive Director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy. As Wesley explains, the South China Sea “gets much less attention than other crisis points in the Taiwan […]

According to reports, militants from Boko Haram in Nigeria, as well as fighters from Pakistan and Afghanistan, are swelling the ranks of AQIM (al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb) in Mali, which is fast becoming a base, training area, and arms depot for international terrorists: …residents and rebels in the north [of Mali] report an influx […]

Assad’s assault on Aleppo started yesterday, with fighting in the Firdous district reported. The Financial Times describes the mood in the city: residents are largely cowering in fear, but some still have sympathies for Assad’s rule. Even supporters seem to acknowledge that the regime is brutal, but the chaos and retribution that could follow the […]

“Anand Shimpi is one of the most influential tech industry figures you’ve never heard of,” writes Reuters. Shimpi has vaulted from armchair tech pundit to one of the industry’s most sought-after opinion leaders, courted by IBM executives and respected by the public as a reliable tech reviewer. His website AnandTech.com gets 12 million unique visitors every […]

If a sense of rising power is stimulating a new strategic discussion in India, a pervading sense of decline is fueling the same kind of discussion in Japan.One one side of Japan’s discussion is a right-wing nationalist movement aimed at returning Japan to relevance, generally by putting up a hard front against an ascendant China. Reuters reports on a […]