We recently posted a story about how the growth of Chinese innovation, when studied closely, isn’t flying ahead at the pace many analysts suggest. Now comes this story about how plagiarism pervades Chinese academia, especially in science and life science papers. When the Journal of Zhejiang University-Science became the first to subscribe to anti-plagiarism software, the editors […]

The federal debt ceiling has not ended America’s financial woes, but budget cutbacks will soon be coming to a state near you.  As Nicholas Johnson at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities told the Washington Post: ‘The debt-limit deal inevitably will lead to large federal cuts in programs for state and local governments…This is […]

News from other New York boroughs continues to bolster Queens’ stature as the most glamorous of the city’s five. Brooklyn’s parks host tribes of vagrants who hunt the local wildlife and cook it over open fires; in Manhattan, as this video shows, rats the size of squirrels have lost their fear of man and frisk […]

Stories about hip young white people moving into decaying urban centers and revitalizing them with their trendy creative brilliance are a dime a dozen.This has something to do with the urbanist bias of the blue journalist world; it also reflects print media’s desperate quest to sell dead trees to people under 30.It has little to […]

From Baghdad via AP: Iraq’s political leaders gave the government the green light Tuesday to begin negotiating a deal with the U.S. to keep American troops in the country past the end of the year to train Iraqi security forces.The good news: they want us.  The bad news: they need us.US military forces should stay; […]

The long running eurozone crisis turned a corner last night, and the news isn’t good.The list of basket cases has grown by two: Spain and Italy can no longer raise money in the bond markets at sustainable rates.  The Spanish government has given up its attempt to serve out its term and has called early […]

The contest for Asian supremacy is heating up.  China’s more assertive military and political posture in the age of Obama is provoking reactions from the neighbors.  In recent weeks Vietnam and the Philippines have spoken up; now even the often reticent and self-effacing Japanese are toughening their tone. As the UPI story has it: China’s […]

The debt ceiling compromise is the end of the liberal dream that the Obama presidency would do for the left what Ronald Reagan’s time in office did for the right. Stanley Greenberg, one of the best pollsters anywhere and a leading intellectual light of the Democratic party, has a must read in the NY Times […]

Obama’s ex-head of policy planning in the State Department and Princeton professor Anne Marie Slaughter has lived in China and knows the place better than most western wonks; her years near the top of the US foreign policy system give added weight to her words.  After attending a conference on China’s future in Singapore, she’s […]

Australia’s Telegraph has a timely list of the many “first” casualties of global warming.  Virtually everything under the sun has been identified as a potential “first casualty” of climate change.  Strangely, there is never a second.Potential candidates for the first casualty are legion.  Is it going to be the entire Australian continent? Or Tuvalu? The […]