The internet is still down in Syria, and fighting is raging in multiple locations across the country in what people fear could be the beginning of a more brutal and destructive phase of the civil war. “In some ways, it’s a Cyclops stabbing itself in the eye,” Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University […]

Pew has some ugly U.S. demographics numbers in a new report out yesterday: The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from 2007 to 2010. The birth rate for U.S.-born women decreased 6% during these years, but […]

The bad news is that Egypt’s constitutional assembly is rushing to finish a deeply flawed document. The good news is that it probably doesn’t mean much; most constitutions around the world tend to be paper documents which the powerful use when convenient and work around when they’re not. That’s long been the Egyptian tradition and […]

On Tuesday the Treasury released its semiannual report on global exchange rates. As usual, much of the focus is on China. As usual, the renminbi (or yuan) is still undervalued. And as usual, the report makes no mention of China as a “currency manipulator,” owing to the fact that use of that label would force […]

“If you don’t know what to do with a man,” wrote Herman Melville, “make him a schoolmaster.” Until recently, if a young man or young woman didn’t know what to do, law school was the logical place to go while you figured it out. Enrollments soared. That seems to be changing.The NYT‘s Economix blog reports […]

The director of the nonpartistan Government Accountability Office, Lorelei St. James, has an unusual recommendation to Capitol Hill: Ditch the dollar bill.While it may be hard to imagine life without the trusty dollar, a switch from $1 bills to $1 coins would be a smart move in the long run, the WSJ reports: The GAO estimates that replacing $1 […]

We don’t know yet for certain whether this is the result of fighting or whether Assad has finally hit some sort of kill switch for his country, but as of today, the Syrian Internet has gone down.Are these the desperation moves of a regime at the end of its rope or a technical problem? Is […]

Readers who know the songs of Tom Lehrer will understand what’s happening with the looming United Nations vote on non-member observer status for the Palestinian Authority.In his song “The Folk Song Army”, Lehrer writes about the Spanish Civil War. The lyrics go: Remember the war against Franco That’s the kind where each of us belongs; Though […]

Obama kept us out of the Syrian war, but now that the election is over, his administration is moving toward a deeper engagement. David Sanger and Eric Schmitt’s report in the New York Times this morning makes it unmistakably clear that Washington is considering far-reaching steps that could involve the United States much more profoundly in […]

China’s Global Times, a daily newspaper run by the Communist Party, put out an interesting piece this week. India and China “can rule waves together”, the piece declares. Is this a Chinese proposal for shared hegemony of Asia’s oceans? Or is China finally getting the message that alienating its neighbors might not be the best […]