Former UN secretary general Kofi Annan is an improvement on previous would-be mediators in Syria (the presence of a notorious war criminal among them sets the bar pretty low). But even he has proven no more effective in quelling the conflict, according to the Washington Post: An international push to end Syria’s conflict stalled Sunday as U.N. […]

According to new reports in the Financial Times, Gordon Brown may have unwittingly dealt an irreparable blow to Britain’s financial services industry, and the full effects of this are only beginning to be felt three years later. Brown deserves a lot of credit for holding fast against Tony Blair’s eagerness to join the eurozone, but in […]

After months of relative neglect, the connection between stalled negotiations in Cyprus and Turkish-EU relations garnered considerable attention from Turkey’s domestic press this week. Turkish Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bağış stated that “all options . . . [including] reunification” are on the table, provided that political equality of Turkish and Greek Cypriots is respected. His […]

In the burgeoning education reform movement, teacher evaluations—especially those using the “value-added” model—have become a central focus for aspiring reformers. Yet a teacher’s take in the New York Times casts serious doubt on these measures. NYC’s teacher evaluations, he says, are wildly inaccurate, with margins of error as high as a startling 57 percent. In his […]

Despite renewed calls for intervention from humanitarian hawks in Congress, it appears the U.S. military doesn’t want a Syrian intervention. An article in this morning’s New York Times cites Pentagon officials warning that a Syrian operation would be very complicated. One senior defense official said over the weekend that even creating “safe havens,” or protected […]

Weekend readers of the New York Times got an eyeful yesterday; the Grey Lady took a long look at New York state, and the result is an article that could almost have appeared in the Weekly Standard or the National Review. While the Times carefully avoided drawing any indelicate conclusions that might upset its liberal […]

Rail stocks dropped in China overnight on word  that a 1,000 foot section of rail line in Hubei province collapsed after heavy rains. Reports in the Chinese media were contradictory; the official news agency Xinhua reported the collapse, but government websites, local reports and some officials denied that anything was going on.Reports of the crash […]

People are starting to notice: Francois Hollande, France’s “anti-Sarkozy” and the current leader in presidential polls, is serious. He wants big changes to the newly signed European fiscal discipline treaty. According to Reuters, Hollande will not “unravel” the treaty but wants “precise measures” like “big industrial projects”, not “cosmetic changes”: “There are parts of this treaty […]

One of the most experienced observers of Israel and Palestine, longtime American negotiator Aaron David Miller, has taken a hammer to the myth that a pernicious pro-Israel cabal controls US foreign policy and is pushing President Obama and the country towards war with Iran. Writing in the NY Times, Miller observes that The notion that […]

Police headquarters and churches came first, but now Boko Haram has added schools to the list of main terror attack targets. And faced with that new reality, as well as the staggering death toll (over 1,000 in three years, 300 of those in just two short months in 2012), it seems Nigeria’s government is growing […]