As Iran’s involvement in Syria deepens, Israel’s stake in the war to its north is growing. Iran will do what it can to increase cooperation between Hezbollah and Syrian government forces, and continues to build Hezbollah’s combat capacity. The chaos in Syria, with troops and weapons moving rapidly across the country, provides an ideal environment […]

Narendra Modi, wonder Governor of the booming state of Gujarat on India’s western coast, is hard at work positioning himself as a candidate for Indian prime minister for the 2014 elections. But Modi’s path to the PM’s office is full of roadblocks. How, for instance, can he convince Indians in the south and east of […]

Powerful Democrats who helped write and pass Obamacare subjected the new law’s chief  administrator to withering criticism at a Senate hearing yesterday. Gary Cohen, the director of the Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight, testified before the Senate Finance Committee, and the Democrats on the committee—from its Chairman Max Baucus to Senators Ron Wyden, Bill Nelson, and Maria […]

When UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon watched North Korea test its third nuclear device this week, he thought of Iran. If the Norks exploited years of diplomatic talks to achieve nuclear capability, Ban appears to be thinking, why couldn’t the mullahs? The WaPo reports: “We should not give much more time to the Iranians, and […]

Argentina’s pensioners are fighting the government to have their benefits adjusted for inflation, with little success so far. The government has been doing everything it can to avoid paying, and now some 450,000 individual cases are inching through an overloaded court system.Much of the problem is due to the government’s decision to use the pension […]

One of the world’s greatest killers is back on the loose. U.S. News reports on the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis in South Africa: A new paper published earlier this week in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal warns that the first cases of “totally drug-resistant” tuberculosis have been found in South Africa and that the disease is […]

A new movement is gaining steam in America: overseas retirement. Kiplinger, a personal finance and business forecast site, recently put out a list of eight great places to retire abroad. The attractions of these places are impressive. Bracketing off the one entry from Spain, the most expensive of the seven places was $2,700 per month […]

Xi Jinping takes over the reins of the Chinese government in one month, and many middle class Chinese hope he pursues a reformist path. But they’re likely to be disappointed. Though Xi has hinted publicly numerous times that he leans toward reform and opening, in private he is much more conservative, even rigidly so, swearing […]

A couple of years ago those who predicted radical changes to legal education were seen as crackpots. That might be starting to change. A panel at NYU Law School discussed the idea of having students take the bar after their second year. The proposal was well received: Many agreed that the third year is useful […]

China’s “Great Firewall” and generally poor IT infrastructure are keeping internet speed down and hurting businesses. The Wall Street Journal reports: Experts say the blocks that keep Chinese users from accessing services like Facebook, Twitter and Google Inc.’s online-video unit YouTube, are hurting businesses, slowing their traffic and hindering their use of a new generation of […]