Last week, international dignitaries converged on London to talk about Somalia. David Cameron declared the conference a “turning point.” As the FT reports, Mr Cameron described Somalia as a ‘complex jigsaw puzzle’ and warned there was ‘no single solution’ for restoring stability. But he said the talks were the next stage in a ‘long journey’ […]

With Romney’s “surprise” victory in Michigan dominating the headlines this morning, the media circus that is the Republican primaries continues to command the full attention of American journalists and is likely to continue to do so well into the summer.This is a shame. The primaries thus far have completely failed to surprise. Romney is still […]

Rahm Emanuel has just added his name to the growing list of blue politicians taking on the core institutions of the blue model. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Chicago School Board has followed the mayor’s advice and voted on plans to restructure a number of the city’s failing schools—often by dismissing the entire […]

The trial against 47 NGO workers (16 of whom are American) began in Cairo yesterday.The case is being whipped up by Egyptian officials who held important posts in the Mubarak government. Mubarak’s strategy was to tolerate, or often support, anti-Americanism even as his government took money from the United States. Indeed, whipping up anti-Americanism in […]

The decline of the blue social model is a subject I’ve been thinking about for the last thirty years. My first book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition was written in the mid 1980s from the standpoint of someone who still believed that the blue model was synonymous with progress and civilization. In that […]

The weekend brought another spate of violent attacks in Nigeria. In the city of Jos, three died outside the Church of Christ headquarters at the hands of a suicide car bomber, which Boko Haram later claimed as their own.Located on the border between the Muslim north and Christian south, Jos has long been a flashpoint […]

As the saying goes, those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. But in the education bureaucracy, those who can’t teach, teach teaching.  And those who can’t teach teaching, evaluate.The New York Times informs us of the struggles, bordering on the absurd, that Tennessee is experiencing as it attempts to conform to the diktats […]

The past few years have seen public pension systems dip into red all over the country. The problem is perhaps at its grandest in California, where the Sacramento Business Journal is now reporting that not a single local pension system has adequate funding.California’s public pensions have universally failed to achieve the standard funding level of 80 percent or higher—many […]

We reported yesterday on the tragic byproduct of foolish subsidies for Argentina’s state rail system. Now it seems President Kirchner’s government is locked in a fight with YPF, a Spanish-owned energy company that controls about 60 percent of Argentina’s energy market.The dispute began when YPF sought to raise local prices. The government balked, and so […]

How do you turn an annual salary of $25,000 into a fortune worth more than $250 million?Become the governor of a Nigerian state.The BBC reports that James Ibori, a former governor of the oil-producing state of Delta, pleaded guilty in a UK court to ten counts of money-laundering and conspiracy to defraud.Ibori spent his ill-gotten […]