Although market conditions vary around the country, Tara Siegel Bernard has a strong piece in the New York Times that potential home buyers and mortgage refinances would do well to consult. The home mortgage market has been very confused ever since the bubble burst late in the last decade as rates have fallen to historic […]

It wasn’t that long ago that Cold War analysts feared Soviet domination of Iran and, with it, the Persian Gulf. The Russian and Persian world had a long history of rivalry, as the Russian Empire gobbled up territories like Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan and parts of Kurdish Anatolia that Persians regarded as belonging to a “Greater Iran.” […]

The robots are breathing down our necks. The Ishikawa Oku Laboratory in Tokyo, experimenting with highspeed motion sensors, have programmed a robot-hand to play rock-paper-scissors, or “roshambo.” Thanks to the motion-sensors, the machine can recognize what move a human is about to make and gain the upper hand, so to speak.IEEE Spectrum has the story: […]

In their quest for American backing, supporters of the Syrian rebels have resorted to a tried-and-true tactic of beltway politics: lobbying. Supporters of the Free Syrian Army have established an outreach office here for a lobbying effort that is likely to feed the Obama administration’s discussions on whether to arm the group or more directly […]

One of Google’s newest products—the Nexus Q—has an interesting new feature. In addition to the futuristic design, the product has one, more unique, characteristic: It was manufactured in America.As the New York Times reports, Google is beginning to experiment with shifting some of its manufacturing to the US. Bucking the trend in Silicon Valley, where […]

With the U.S. set to join China and the rest of the ASEAN countries in Cambodia for an annual regional gathering next week, the atmosphere between Beijing and Washington is frosty, but there are efforts to get a thaw underway. According to Reuters, Kurt Campbell, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, will head […]

Barack Obama has always been popular around the world. But while the president’s support at home has ebbed considerably since the heady days of November 2008, he is still well-regarded abroad, as Dan Drezner discovered after giving a speech to a group of international institutional investors about the state of play in this year’s election.Drezner […]

Anyone skimming through the comments to my posts on the German court ruling outlawing the circumcision of (male) children, and therefore the practice of Judaism as it has been understood by Jewish parents for thousands of years as well as the practice of Islam, can see what passions this subject stirs up.But Germany is a […]

Much to the surprise (and, one suspects, the chagrin) of the deranged doomsaying wing of the environmental movement, new forecasts of US CO2 emission are out and they point to an even steeper drop than the last set of predictions.No cap and trade, no huge new taxes on oil, no draconian driver restrictions, no air […]

This week Serbia’s government took a hard turn to the right—and to the east. Yesterday the new nationalist president appointed Ivica Dacic, a protégé of the late strongman Slobodan Milosevic, as prime minister.Now, along with Nikolic’s nationalists, Milosevic’s old progressive party will dominate the government. Both parties are very interested in tightening Serbia’s alliance with […]