The image above is the cover story of the latest issue of the Economist. The topic is the resurgence of al-Qaeda and the call-it-anything-but-the-Global-War-on-Terror. A key passage from the leader: How much should Western complacency be blamed for this stunning revival? Quite a bit. Mr Obama was too eager to cut and run from Iraq. He […]

Everybody is staring transfixed at the US-Iran relationship and the UN struggle over Syria, but Egypt remains the key to Middle Eastern stability. The biggest question in the region is whether the new Egyptian government will stabilize the situation beyond the short term. The economics minister has laid out a plan:1. Use money from friendly […]

When you get past the Tesla-fueled hype—the Elon Musk cheerleading, the various super- and hyper- prefixes in front of the requisite infrastructure—the renaissance of the electric car has been mostly underwhelming. Tesla’s approach has been to tout the sexy, high-end models first to help stoke demand for the product. Other carmakers like Nissan and Chevy […]

Chicago has the highest pension burden in the nation, with liabilities amounting to an alarming 678 percent of revenues, according to a report by Moody’s. The ratings agency’s warning, coupled with the fact that the city will need to drastically increase pension contributions by 2015, has prompted Mayor Rahm Emanuel to try to buy some time. […]

Bill Gates has dedicated his post-Microsoft life to humanitarian work—the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has directed billions of dollars toward health and development programs around the world. But Gates sees energy reform as the quickest path toward reducing poverty, saying in a 2010 TED speech that “if you could pick just one thing to lower […]

If you could retire for 40 dollars a day, would you? A BBC piece today suggest that British citizens are increasingly answering in the affirmative: With the low cost of medicine, English-speaking retirement communities and affordable housing, many are heading to tropical destinations, including South America and Southeast Asia where it’s doable to live on […]

At the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, delegates voted to set up a Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help poorer countries adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. The Fund would draw on the coffers of the developed world, which collectively pledged to raise $100 billion per year by 2020. […]

Different provisions of Obamacare has been delayed in many ways in the last several months, most notably the employer mandate. By putting off the implementation of some important but vexing parts of the law, the administration presumably hoped to make the launch as smooth as possible. Once the basic infrastructure of exchanges and subsidies was […]

Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s opposition Labour Party, pledged this week to freeze British energy prices if elected in 2015. It’s one of the more obvious cases of a political party going for the grand pander rather than opting for a serious, well-thought out policy. The decision to intervene in the country’s energy markets—even […]

Putin’s been having a tough week in his backyard. First China began to push Russia out of Kazakhstan; now the EU is making a concerted effort to lure Ukraine away from Russia following Putin’s attempts to intimidate it into backing out of talks with the EU. The FT reports: The EU’s two most senior officials—José Manuel […]