Japan and North Korea are holding their first official face-to-face discussions in four years, according to the BBC. (The two countries currently have no diplomatic relations.) Is this a sign of a friendly future, or will North Korea once again, like Lucy, snatch the football away?For Japan, there is no downside to testing whether North Korea is […]

After much backroom wrangling, the contents of Governor Jerry Brown’s much-touted California pension reform bill have finally been made public just a few days before the vote at the end of the week. As we predicted when we last heard about the bill, the final product contains a few steps in the right direction, but […]

A court in Georgia has heard how four self-described “anarchist” U.S. soldiers planned to kill President Obama and overthrow the U.S. government. The group is on trial in civilian court for a separate incident: the alleged murder of a fellow officer and his girlfriend, who knew about the group’s activities and was killed because, in the […]

Here’s some more evidence that the U.S. economy has a bright outlook in the long term: The Wall Street Journal reports that jobs that once moved to Asia are now returning to the United States.While the outsourcing of back-office and call center work to Asia is likely to continue, many companies are looking to source more […]

A recent BBC piece on the decay and squalor of the Gaza Strip nicely illustrates the bizarre bias in so much media coverage of Palestinian issues. Despite reports in Arab and Israeli media suggesting that Egyptian forces are destroying smuggling tunnels into Gaza, and despite Egypt’s continued refusal to open its border with Gaza, the BBC […]

So far, foreign policy has been almost wholly absent from the presidential race. The Wall Street Journal thinks this is about to change. Following the convention in Tampa, the Romney camp is reportedly preparing a series of speeches and events to highlight its criticisms of the Obama administration’s foreign policies.This case will be difficult to […]

Pakistan was built on a rejection of secularism, democracy and pluralism: everything India stood for. It established itself as a Muslim country, and politicians eventually clarified exactly who is “Muslim” according to the Constitution.As the Army battles the Pakistani Taliban, that definition is under dispute. As Feisal Naqvi writes in an illuminating article in Pakistan’s Express […]

The Washington Post‘s ‘The Fix’ blog has some bad news for Democrats: their attempts to paint Paul Ryan as an extremist fringe candidate seem to have failed. A new Washington Post-Pew Research Center poll asked Americans to say what one word comes to mind when they think about the GOP vice presidential nominee. And people […]

China launched its first aircraft carrier, an antique bought from Ukraine, about a year ago to much fanfare in China and hand wringing abroad. The international media saw this as a “potent” sign of China’s growing naval prowess.But the carrier is still a long way from being a battle-ready warship. Reuters reports: Despite public anticipation […]

The latest Pew survey of the state of America’s middle class doesn’t mince words: the subtitle of the report is “smaller, poorer, gloomier.” The lost decade for our middle-class is something to lament in itself, but its effect on the upcoming election may be equally significant.According to Pew’s data, President Obama is enjoying a slight […]