With a civil war raging late last year, the do-gooder NGO crowd was aggressively pushing independence for South Sudan as a solution to the violence raging across Sudan. So far, it doesn’t seem to be working out very well. After nearly a year of minor skirmishes and tribal conflict, the sides appear closer to war […]

Before he became the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren carved out an impressive career as a historian, teaching at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown, and penning two critically acclaimed works of Middle East scholarship, Six Days of War and Power, Faith and Fantasy. His essay, “Israel’s Resilient Democracy,” recently published in Foreign Policy, […]

Solar’s bad year continues as yet another solar company’s ambitious projects prove unprofitable. Fledgling solar provider BrightSource Energy canceled an IPO at the last minute, admitting that it couldn’t find buyers at the expected price. And BrightSource is not alone in its stock woes—the New York Times reports that leading companies like First Solar and […]

As austerity bites, European politics is turning nasty, fast. The smart, cosmopolitan, enlightened Brussels elite and the well-groomed, well-bred moderate national political leaders have completely trashed Europe. The people are angry. Unfortunately, Europeans in the past have made incredibly stupid decisions when they are angry: Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler… the list goes on.Take Greece. “Greek society at […]

Via Meadia isn’t an economic forecasting site; if I knew what the world economy was going to be doing tomorrow I would be too busy making zillions by trading exotic financial instruments the rest of you bozos know nothing about to share my secret insights with the rest of you. (Indeed, one useful thing to […]

Michael Madigan is a Democrat and serves as Speaker of the House in the Illinois state legislature. He is also horrified about the state’s mind-blowing shortfall of $80 billion needed for the state’s retirement system to pay all its obligations.Madigan thinks the best solution would be an amendment to the Illinois constitution that would require […]

Young internet users can be impressively resourceful. China’s formidable web censors are finding it difficult to control online discussions about Bo Xilai, his wife, Neil Heywood, and other aspects of the most exciting political intrigue to hit China in years.As the FT reports, [T]he country’s 500m-odd web users debated the political drama anyway using pictures, code-words and […]

Despite warnings from the United States, the UN, and virtually every major power in Asia, North Korea yesterday went ahead with its planned long-range missile launch. The missile, which supposedly had the capability to reach as far as Australia, fell apart less than two minutes after take-off. It was a serious embarrassment for Pyongyang, which […]

The Bo Xilai scandal that has exposed deep rifts at the heart of the Chinese political system and grown into an international saga of spy-thriller dimensions led this week to the arrest of Bo’s wife under suspicion of murder. Now it is evolving into a larger indictment of corruption in China.The NYT reports that Chinese […]

The story of Gujurat’s 2002 riots is well-known to most Indians: After a train fire that killed sixty Hindus was blamed on Muslims, Hindu mobs rampaged through towns and cities, killing Muslims and burning buildings. In the end, more than 1,000 were killed.Today, the prosecution of 18 accused Hindu rioters ended with life sentences for […]