The change in tone and what is billed as a significant new proposal from Iran have led to a lot of optimism in the press lately. Are we near a resolution to this crisis at last?Certainly we, like many others, hope that this dispute is on the road to a peaceful resolution. The US and […]

Fresh off the news that Stockton, California doesn’t plan to touch a dollar of its pensions in its bankruptcy plan, Reuters reports that Moody’s has plunged the city’s pension bonds to the depths of junk status: Moody’s Investors Service lowered the pension obligation bonds of Stockton, California, to ‘Ca’ from ‘Caa3’ on Monday and changed […]

The third week of enrollment in the federal exchanges opened with these strong words from one of the ACA’s biggest supporters, Ezra Klein: “So far, the Affordable Care Act’s launch has been a failure. Not ‘troubled.’ Not ‘glitchy.’ A failure…The magnitude of this failure is stunning. “Klein offers five takes on the ACA’s persistent rollout problems, […]

I just spent two weeks traveling across Europe, visiting France, Italy, Germany, and Romania. Everywhere I went, people wanted to talk about Washington’s dispiriting budget shenanigans, the European implications of the “pivot to Asia” and the mess in the Middle East. But while the Europeans are more or less united on the subject of America’s […]

It’s called ken-kan—from the Japanese characters meaning “to hate” and “Republic of Korea”—and it’s spreading. For 11 straight days this month, the front page of a national tabloid was splashed with ken-kan stories: “South Korea blasts into 20-year-long economic panic,” “South Korea’s President Park accelerates tyrannical rule.” Why? It sells newspapers. It resonates with under-30 editors at […]

Larry Summers wrote a smart column in the FT this past weekend, arguing that the debt ceiling deadlock in Washington and its attendant wrangling over minutiae like medical device taxes may very well go down in history as a minor event. The debt itself, he argues, shouldn’t be keeping us up at night: it’s a […]

The murder of a 25 year-old Russian national last Thursday led to a violent riot in Moscow on Sunday. After a media outlet reported that the suspect in the murder was of “non-Slavic appearance”, Muscovites gathered to protest, attacking a vegetable warehouse that employs large numbers of illegal migrant workers, most of them Muslims from […]

Some of the environmental movement’s smarter members are ditching the knee-jerk, emotionally-wrought strategy to bash fracking as an evil phenomenon. The shale energy debate is extremely polarized, its middle ground deserted, but some notable “fracktivists” are crossing the green picket line. The AP reports: In one northeastern Pennsylvania village that became a global flashpoint in […]

In addition to his Le Monde interview, WRM also give at a talk at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales on the future of US power and US leadership when he was in France. And this one is in English! A taste: The US has come to the end of the road in some ways in the Middle […]

America’s nuclear industry isn’t healthy. Thanks to the rise of cheap shale energy, four nuclear plants have closed so far this year. Older reactors can’t compete with today’s energy market conditions, but a new generation of nuclear technology promises to breathe new life into the industry. NuScale Power has plans to shrink containment vessels down to […]