India and Russia announced a multibillion dollar arms deal today, Reuters reports, a story that says a lot about the new Asian power dynamics.First, this tells us India won’t be an American patsy. Buying arms from Russia is a way among other things to assert India’s independence and to ensure that it doesn’t become too […]

As we expected, Egypt’s new constitution, drafted by the Islamist-dominated government, was approved by voters yesterday, the Washington Post reports: Egyptians have approved a new constitution that will deepen the influence of Islamic law in their country, but will likely lead to further divisions after a month-long political crisis.Preliminary and unofficial results on Sunday from […]

This week Dan Drezner took us to task for our overuse of the word “bubble” to describe the changes under way in higher education, arguing that these changes are not come quickly enough to qualify as a true bubble. We fired back with this response: The big difference between the bubble metaphor as classically used […]

No matter how huge America’s oil and gas bonanza is, we won’t be disengaging from the world any time soon. That’s the sage wisdom former WRM colleague Michael Levi imparts in a recent op-ed in the NYT: Instability in the Middle East would still hit motorists in the Midwest, and the United States would still […]

President Putin is doing his best to spin the numbers on Russian demography. After catastrophic declines in population since the death of the Soviet Union, Russia saw births outnumber deaths last year and, temporarily, the demographic numbers look better. As the Financial Times reports, the ebullient sounding President remarked that the solution to Russia’s demographic […]

In France, the socialists have won: nobody seems very happy this Christmas. Champagne sales are down, France’s top actor and its richest man have both fled to Belgium, and families everywhere are cutting back on toys for their kids. “For the first time, toys this year have become a variable [in household budgets],” Serge Papin, […]

Around this time last year, Fareed Zakaria named 2012 the “Year of the Election“. The name made sense: China, Russia, Japan, France and the US all had elections or leadership transitions this year, to say nothing of the multitude of smaller nations that made changes at the top.But while most attention has been paid to […]

San Bernardino just scored a victory in court in its struggle with Calpers, California’s state pension system. After entering bankruptcy this summer, San Bernardino had ceased payments to the pension fund, claiming that it doesn’t have the money to meet its pension obligations and still pay salaries for essential city services. In response, Calpers took […]

Russia and the EU had a summit in Brussels this week, and Russia’s perpetual leader continues to underestimate the resolve of the newly-assertive, beleaguered, German-dominated EU. On a number of issues Moscow is running into a European bureaucratic phalanx—from energy and trade disputes, to human rights and Syria policy.The top issue on the agenda is […]

One part of Argentina’s long national nightmare is finally over. The Libertad, a three-masted training ship and the “pride of Argentina’s navy”, had been held in Ghana’s main port since October. Now thanks to a UN court, the ship has been freed to return home: On Saturday, the UN Tribunal for the Law of the […]