Jon Huntsman, the former Ambassador to China, is getting nervous about how things are playing out in Asia: “The tensions are real,” he said, citing the two nations’ maneuvering over islands in the East China Sea. Risks also are being raised by expanding activities such as surveillance flights in the region by other nations, including […]

Cyprus has long been an oligarch’s playground for Russian billionaires with close ties to the government. In 2009 Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian lawyer, died in prison, where he had been languishing after accusing Russian officials of tax fraud to the tune of $230 million—$30 million of which he claimed was deposited in Cyprus banks. The […]

French President François Hollande did his best ostrich impression on Thursday, skipping the beginning of an EU meeting on budget cuts and turning off his phone. The meeting in Brussels was meant to hammer out a compromise between Hollande and austerity-minded UK Prime Minister David Cameron. The two were tens of billions of euros apart on […]

An article in Slate is throwing the brakes on the shale train. University of Chicago Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is critical of bullish predictions of America’s bright energy future: [T]he days are long gone when you could stick a pitchfork in the ground and get a gusher that would produce for years. The new wells are expensive (on the order […]

Calpers, the largest public pension fund in the nation, sucks nearly $4 billion per year out of California’s state budget, but it’s still so desperate for cash that it has resorted to suing bankrupt cities.Steven Malanga at City Journal has an excellent piece describing how Calpers went from a prudent and responsible public pension fund to […]

Powerful weapons looted from Libyan stockpiles escaped the clutches of concerned NATO officials and found their way to conflicts across Africa and the Middle East, including Mali, where they bolstered the arsenal of radical Islamists and changed the course of the war. The NYT‘s indefatigable C.J. Chivers reports: The projectiles in question were NR-160s, antitank munitions […]

A billion overseas poor will soon get internet access, said outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, announcing a new State Department partnership with foundations and private companies. Bloomberg reports on the program: The public-private partnership among the State Department, the World Wide Web Foundation, and tech companies including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc., Intel Corp., and Cisco Systems […]

It seems like everyone is needling Japan these days. Two Russian Su-27 fighter jets flew through Japanese airspace near Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island, for just over a minute yesterday.The Russian aerial incursion came on Northern Territory Day in Japan, which commemorates the 1855 treaty between the two countries that defines the South Kuril Islands […]

In this hyper-partisan age there’s at least one thing Americans seem to agree is good: killing terrorists without risking American lives. That’s the consensus from public opinion polls on the President’s use of drone strikes: A February 2012 Washington Post-ABC poll showed that eight in ten Americans (83 percent) approved of the Obama Administrations use […]

In one of the biggest national security stories in a long time, Leon Panetta revealed yesterday that the Pentagon and the State Department had backed arming the rebels in Syria last year. The White House wasn’t interested. That now looks increasingly like a historic mistake that increases the odds of the ultimate nightmare for the […]