Argentina and Britain have once again been trading barbs over the disputed Falkland Islands, and now Argentina has declared what the British are calling “economic blockade” on the islands, refusing to allow ships flying the British flag to land in Argentinian ports. As the BBC reports: Argentina has been turning away cruise ships carrying the […]

As the Washington Post’s Wonkblog reports, while American homes keep getting bigger and we keep stocking them with growing numbers of energy hogging devices like big screen TVs, energy use per homeowner is actually shrinking.  Overall, even though we have 30 million more homes than we did in 1980, and though these homes are bigger […]

In the Biblical story, God sent ten plagues to Egypt to persuade Pharaoh to let the Israelites go. The news from Cairo today suggests that at least one of those plagues — the plague of darkness — is back.From the Associated Press: A mob of hundreds of men assaulted women holding a march demanding an […]

Australia has become a popular partner in Asia’s Game of Thrones. Both China and the United States have courted it in the past few months, with varying success. China has highlighted its own economic importance as a major trade partner, while the U.S. has strengthened military cooperation both in Afghanistan and at new American bases […]

President Obama has authorized what appears to be the first use of cyber warfare (beyond passive information retrieval), in what Steve Coll has called “the first formal offensive act of pure cyber sabotage by the United States against another country, if you do not count electronic penetrations that have preceded conventional military attacks.” The target? […]

In Egypt, the Arab Spring feels more like an Arab “Thermidor.” Thermidor, one of the summer months of France’s revolutionary calendar, was the month in which Robespierre was overthrown and sent to the guillotine. Today, it’s generally taken to mean the end of the most radical phase of a revolution, or the beginning of the […]

This past week’s New York Times has been a showcase in just how little we understand how our world works and just how fluid scientific consensus can be. On June 2, in a piece entitled “Salt, We Misjudged You,” Science magazine correspondent Gary Taubes debunked the conventional wisdom that salt is bad for us: Although […]

Remember peak oil? This was supposed to be the time when the earth’s oil supply began to run dry. Green energy buffs told us that one reason for subsidizing expensive green energy boondoggles was that the oil would soon be gone and we had to have something to put in its place.As Aragorn might have […]

In Stockton, California, the dangerous combination of high debt and low employment has sent the city into state-mandated mediation to stave off bankruptcy. But the city is already preparing its bankruptcy case in the event that mediation doesn’t work. The Wall Street Journal details the city’s problems: The city of 300,000 in the agriculture-heavy Central […]

This week IMF chief Christine Lagarde betrayed a hint of frustration with Europe’s leaders. She suspects they know how to fix the continent’s problems, but don’t quite have the will, the desire, or the domestic support to do what must be done: “If I was able to do one thing, I would lock them in a […]