Last week we highlighted a report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) that stated Iran’s oil production could plummet to levels last seen during the Iran-Iraq War three decades ago. The IEA has lately estimated that, from July onward, when EU sanctions come into effect, Iranian exports could be reduced by about 800,000 to one […]

Last week South Africa, one of the last major importers of Iranian oil to seek alternative sources, tightened the knot on the noose around Tehran’s neck.South Africa’s minister of energy, Elizabeth Dipuo Peters, has announced plans to have alternative sources to Iranian crude in place by the self-imposed deadline of May. This is a significant move—and […]

Since the fall of the British Empire back in the 20th century, many have believed that the British are doomed to forever pine for the glory days. Yet while Britain may never be as powerful as it was in its heyday, there are signs that reports of its decline, to paraphrase Mark Twain, have been […]

The Mayans turned out to be wrong; the world can’t end on December 21 of this year because it ended this morning. That’s when a major American newspaper ran a straight story about an international cricket match, written in pure cricketese without benefit of translation or explanation for those benighted few among us who don’t […]

Tensions are rising between the two largest economies and most powerful military forces in Asia: Japan’s Prime Minister Yoshiko Noda is using some very un-Japanese language (direct, forceful, naming names) to address what he sees as a growing threat. As the [paywall alert] Wall Street Journal reports, Noda told graduating cadets at Japan’s National Defense […]

So there it is: Via Meadia‘s best projection for the 2012 election results based on current polls.  You can compare Romney’s projected electoral vote with Santorum’s, and with President Obama’s actual results against Senator McCain in 2008. We’ve derived this from some quick and dirty back of the envelope guesses complex mathematical formulae using our […]

This past week, our latest essay Beyond Blue series looked at some housing trends which may point the way to an efficient yet distinctively suburban future. It turns out young people prefer free-standing homes over crowded cities, and there’s hope that multi-generational family dwellings are the wave of the future.As far as the blue model itself, we continued our […]

The United States is consumed by an immigration debate shaped in large part by fears that don’t match the facts.There are legitimate questions about immigration: whether policy should favor skilled or unskilled migrants, how “global” do we really want our policy to be, what do we do about the related problems of border control and […]

The Brookings Institute, in partnership with the Center for the Constitution, has just launched a new site called ConText. Its purpose? To crowd-source scholarly and popular commentary for the underappreciated notes of James Madison on the debates of the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787.The project, which aims to surround the notes themselves with columns of […]

Rush Limbaugh said some mean things to a young woman, and is reaping the results of his remarks. Something like 100 advertisers have dropped his show, and the decency police don’t think he’s suffered nearly enough.Some on the right have looked at the left’s tolerance of self-confessed “pottymouth” Bill Maher and seen a double standard. […]