Puerto Rico’s troubles continue to mount as two of the biggest underwriters of its debt, Citigroup and UBS, felt compelled to disclose the extent of their exposure to the island territory last week. According to the Financial Times, they did their best to put a positive spin on things: Citigroup, which has a 95-year history in Puerto […]

News broke just before the weekend of yet another leak emanating from the White House, this time identifying Israel as responsible for air strikes on a Syrian military base last Wednesday intended to disrupt a weapons delivery to Hezbollah. According to the Times of Israel, Jerusalem is furious: Israel’s Channel 10 TV on Friday night quoted Israeli […]

Oil and gas production isn’t the only thing booming in America—the efficiency with which we’re extracting new sources of hydrocarbons is skyrocketing as well, as you can see in the graph above. In fact, drilling productivity has risen so much that the Energy Information Administration can no longer use rig count as an accurate metric […]

In a sign of deepening distrust in East Asia, South Korea’s president, Park Geun-hye, rejected the prospect of a summit with Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe. There is “no purpose” for a discussion with Tokyo, President Park indicated, unless Abe apologizes for Japan’s historical wrongdoings. In a wide-ranging interview with the BBC, Ms. Park was blunt: The […]

Turkey and Israel have drifted apart in recent years for all sorts of reasons, a trend only exacerbated by the ugly anti-Semitic statements made by the Turkish deputy prime minister and state-affiliated media over the summer. These tensions have been an impediment to the development of a pipeline that would carry Israel’s new bounty of offshore gas […]

Last Friday, two members of Greece’s far-right Golden Dawn party were killed in a drive-by shooting directly outside the party’s headquarters near Athens. Although nobody knows yet who was behind the shooting, it comes about two month after an anti-fascist hip-hop musician was stabbed to death by a Golden Dawn supporter, and just after the […]

After five years of a president who was going to rebuild trust with key allies in Europe and with important rising powers like Brazil, this is where we are: Brazil and Germany are jointly sponsoring a resolution to the floor of the UN General Assembly condemning invasions of privacy. The resolution doesn’t name names, but […]

After sixty years of socialist revolution in Cuba, it appears that the proletariat still prefer vile capitalist entertainment to socially uplifting official films. Raul Castro is having none of it. He sent out a decree shutting down scores of private movie and video game parlors run out of the backs of officially-sanctioned restaurants. The BBC: […]

This week, we took a look at how mass immigration in Europe is posing a serious threat to the welfare states that most of the continent has been building for the past half-century: Europe’s social engineers of the last generation seem to have assumed that the “dark forces” of nationalism and chauvinism had been left […]

Over the weekend, four leading climate scientists begged the green movement to see reason on nuclear energy. The group—which included the scientist cum-activist who ominously (and wrongly) predicted that developing Canadian tar sands oil would be “game over” for the planet—sent a letter to a number of green groups making the case for the latest […]