The fate of Detroit could be decided this month.  Long suffering Detroit could run out of cash completely by spring, and has an unresolved $200 million hole in its budget through June.  Under Michigan law, when the city’s bonds drop below the BBB level, the governor can appoint an emergency manager with broad powers to […]

Over at the always interesting Small Wars Journal, Tony Corn has a stimulating piece on the implications of the European crisis for world politics.  He sees a clueless German policy establishment recklessly moving toward an unsustainable quest for power reminiscent in too many ways of problems Germany has had in its past.Germany, warns Corn, is […]

The Israeli government is worried about a trickle of Israeli citizens moving to the United States; in order to lure some of them back it began running ads on websites that Israeli expats in the US often visit.  Ads showed Israeli grandparents worried that their US-raised granddaughter thought Hanukkah was Christmas and so on.Once American […]

Here’s a good sign of Chinese-American cooperation. The Associated Press reports that China wants to invest some of its US government debt in American infrastructure: China wants to convert some of its mountain of U.S. government debt into investment in renovating American roads and subways, the commerce minister said Friday. Speaking to a business group, […]

In a surprising reversal, Lebanon’s Hezbollah backed government agreed to pay its share of funds to the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon, which is investigating the murder of a former Prime Minister. The New York Times reports: The United Nations-backed tribunal investigating the killing of a former Lebanese prime minister said Thursday that it had […]

Christians have not had a good time in the modern Middle East.  Sadly, that doesn’t seem likely to change as Butcher Assad’s hold on Syria slowly slips.  While Via Meadia is no fan of Iran-enabling tyrants who kill thousands of their own people, there are good reasons to be concerned about the plight of minorities […]

As more information emerges about the SAT-cheating scandal on Long Island, it has become clear that this isn’t a story about kids.  Parents and school officials have gone off the rails.  As the NYT reports, parents did nothing as their children paid stand-ins as much as $3,600 to catapult their scores into the 2100 range; […]

It looks like climatologists could learn some lessons from salt. A recently concluded massive study on the effects of salt in the human diet found that — contrary to public perception — in people at risk for heart disease, less salt was not always more beneficial. A moderate amount of salt, scientists now say, is better than […]

The eurocrisis is a marathon, not a sprint, Chancellor Angela Merkel told the German parliament yesterday.  Thanks to the massive, Fed-organized central bank interventions of the last couple of days, she could be right.While the European financial system is still under great stress, world business leaders are not going to bed at night wondering if […]

Whatever happens at the global green gabfest in Durban, greens will, no doubt, take comfort in assuring themselves that science is on their side.Well, not quite. It seems that Science — that is, one of the world’s most prestigious and influential scientific journals — is open to doubts about some of the more dire premises regularly […]