The slowly expanding sovereign-debt crisis and Europe’s halfhearted attempts to deal with it have dominated reporting about Europe for the past few years, but the Continent has a graver and even more intractable problem. Megan McArdle points out at The Atlantic that even if Europe manages to get its finances under control its demographics threaten […]

Public universities are increasingly cash-strapped, but they’re also understandably reluctant to increase tuition, which has already risen by more than 70 percent over the past decade. So some schools are turning to other means to raise revenue, such as privatizing peripheral facilities like parking lots and dormitories, according to the Wall Street Journal.The WSJ piece highlights […]

The Muslim Brotherhood recently decided to abandon its pledge not to field its own presidential candidate, and that candidate now has Washington’s tacit approval. Obama administration officials are wary of the popularity of conservative Islamists in post-Mubarak Egypt, but they seem to have decided that the Brotherhood’s candidate is preferable to some of the more troubling alternatives. The […]

As blue model jobs continue to fade away, we see, via Instapundit, that some entrepreneurs are already pitching ideas for the jobs of the future. Developer Ted Roden’s Fancy Hands is one of the more intriguing examples of a post-blue job we’ve seen so far. The core idea is simple. Ordinary people have an incredible number of […]

The three big ethno-political groups in Iraq—Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds—are testing their respective strengths. The latest sign of the three-way competition becoming more intense is former Vice President Tariq al-Hashemi’s trip this week to Qatar. Hashemi has been accused by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki of “running death squads” and is wanted by the government in […]

The Wall Street Journal reports that some of the objections being raised to hydraulic fracking have turned out to be quite overblown: The Environmental Protection Agency has dropped its claim that an energy company contaminated drinking water in Texas, the third time in recent months that the agency has backtracked on high-profile local allegations linking […]

The leaders of the Lozi people, an ethnic group in western Zambia, are demanding independence, reports the BBC. Claiming that the central government is ignoring promises of autonomy dating back to the 1960s, the Lozi say they are beginning a process of “peaceful disengagement” from Zambia’s central government.  This may or may not stay peaceful; […]

Some of India’s private companies are among the best managed firms in the world. Government, however, is another story. Not only is India’s government notoriously corrupt and slow; it lacks the capacity to make basic decisions and repeated failures to manage issues like infrastructure development, land sales and natural resources are reaching a critical mass.The […]

Via Meadia featured several essays this week: President Obama’s was in Seoul, and Via Meadia put his actions—even the hot mic gaffe with Medvedev over missile defense—into the broader regional context of America’s repositioning in Asia. In the aftermath of the tragic murder of Jewish children in Toulouse, it’s clear that anti-Semitic habits of mind die […]

A country’s presidential election is partly a reflection of its political identity. The contrast between the United States’ messy but direct, democratic horserace primaries and the seamless power transfer China hoped for before l’affaire Bo Xilai ruined it all speaks volumes about the respective natures of these two countries’ political systems.Now turn to France, where […]