How do politicians in a democracy balance domestic politics and international realities?They juggle, and that is what India did at the UN’s Human Rights Council vote on (credibly) alleged war crimes and other violations of the rights of the Tamil minority on Sri Lanka. India voted for the resolution, pleasing the 60 million Tamils who […]

Following a wave of recent raids on abortion providers in the UK, the British Department of Health has reached a shocking conclusion: More than one in five may be breaking the law. The Telegraph reports that of the 250 providers investigated in this week’s raid, more than 50 were cited for falsifying consent forms and […]

Earlier this month, we covered news that half of British nursing home patients were being denied basic health services as a result of inefficiencies in Britain’s massive health bureaucracy. Yet before we gloat that such things would never happen here, the New York Times has a story on a new report from New York state claiming […]

Longtime watchers of Argentina have seen this movie before: in the aftermath of a mighty economic crash, an Argentine government embraces an unorthodox set of economic polices. For a time, they work—partly because the crash was so huge that some kind of recovery was inevitable and partly because Argentina’s rich natural resource endowment (fertile soil, […]

Both Russia and the West appear to be losing confidence in their respective “allies” in Syria. In what the Wall Street Journal described as “a rare sign of international unity over the standoff”, the United Nations Security Council has endorsed a plan to end the bloodshed in Syria: The statement supports a six-point plan by U.N.-Arab League […]

The massive bubble in higher ed has been expanding for some time now, but late last year it hit a new, ignominious milestone when total student loan debt topped $1 trillion. Not only is this a record high; it is 16 percent higher than already pessimistic estimates by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.Don’t […]

Renegade soldiers took power in Mali’s capital city, Bamako, on Wednesday, apparently incensed that the government was not doing enough to help the army fight rebels in the northern deserts. The rebels—mostly Tuareg tribesmen who have periodically risen up against the government—restarted their old fight with new weapons brought over from Libya. The ghost of […]

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is leading an increasingly unpopular government in New Delhi. A new scandal erupted this week, as the FT reports: Companies run by some of India’s top industrialists received “undue benefits” worth $210bn when they bought underpriced coal assets between 2004 and 2009, according to a state audit that threatens to destabilise further Manmohan […]

As the Cuban government prepares to welcome Pope Benedict (the second papal visit to the Communist island since the Castro brothers came to power in 1959), its security forces marked the occasion by cracking down on a group of unarmed women peacefully demonstrating for human rights.As the NYT reports, the “Ladies in White” (Damas de […]

One of the stereotypes about Asia that persists is that Asian cultures aren’t confrontational; Asians, the old view holds, are indirect, say ‘yes’ when they mean ‘no’ to save face and so on.All we can say is that these people don’t know Korea very well. Take Kim-Myung-ho, a South Korean math professor, who isn’t happy […]