Results are still coming in (and we’re following the FT live blog to keep tabs on the latest) but the Italian elections seem to have resulted in a big win for Silvio Berlusconi. While he’s nowhere near able to build a government on his own, the results up to now seem to indicate that he’s […]

A top Iranian official says that Iran will continue to produce oil for 140 years. And that’s not even counting any new sources they may discover in the future. In fact, despite heavy U.S.-led sanctions and plummeting oil production, Iran has discovered 14 billion barrels of crude oil over the past year: Iran’s offshore oil […]

Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe came to Washington for the weekend. High on his agenda was a handful of tiny, rocky islets in the East China Sea—islets claimed by both Japan and China. He came to Washington hoping to get a powerful endorsement from Obama for his country’s claim. Chinese media is gleefully reporting Abe’s failure […]

President Obama promised last year that trillions of dollars in planned defense cuts “will not happen.” That’s beginning to look like a mistake. Republicans, says the New York Times, may be willing to bite the bullet on defense: “Fiscal questions trump defense in a way they never would have after 9/11,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican […]

For decades now, Americans have been telling the EU that if it wants the world to take it seriously, it needs to admit Turkey as a member. Turkey’s strong military forces, its growing economy and its key position in the Middle East would add considerable weight to Europe’s global position and deliver a boost to […]

Regional good news can sometimes point to larger problems. Ireland, for instance, is projected to grow faster than any other European economy over the next two years, and there are also signs that Iceland is getting back on its feet after the devastating 2008 financial crash.First, Reuters on Iceland: Iceland’s Arion Bank, formerly Kaupthing Bank, said […]

First came reports that Egypt had flooded the Gaza tunnel network with water; then last week, the NYT updated the story with a nasty new detail: “Awful,” said Abu Mutair Shalouf, 35, a Palestinian smuggler on the Gaza side, watching workers haul buckets of sewage-soaked soil from the shaft of a tunnel flooded by the Egyptian military 15 days ago. […]

WRM has been teaching a class on the public intellectual in the age of the internet at Bard College, and has been helping his students to hone their writing chops: In the last couple of classes we’ve been looking at a strategy that many writers used at that time: writing about political and other non-lyrical […]

The ongoing success story in Mexico is one of the most important that the American press has missed in the last few years. We keep seeing Mexico as nothing but trouble—drug cartels, illegal immigration—when in fact a new reality is taking shape. In his most recent must-read column for the NYT, Friedman sheds some much-needed light […]

Too good to be true? Earlier this week, we heard rumblings of a potential revolution in agriculture, as a farming method developed by a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI), reportedly was producing world-record yields in India. But not everyone is convinced. The Guardian reports that a Chinese scientist is pouring […]