The long running Syrian melodrama, one in which nobody knows the endgame, continues to unfold.  Butcher Assad has essentially won the battle to control Syria’s streets.  He has also staved off any chance of international military intervention at least for now.Today’s Arab League vote suspending Syria’s membership illustrates Assad’s isolation but is of little importance […]

The furor over fracking aside, the large environmental controversy du jour is the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry “dirty” fuel from the Canadian tar sands to waiting markets and refineries in the U.S. The past few months have seen the administration vacillate repeatedly on the issue, and it has just announced that it […]

Vincent Charpentier works at a French institute for “preventive archaeology,” whatever that is, but apparently has enough time on his hands to go after the world’s most beloved ancient Gauls, the Asterix and Obelix whose adventures fill a series of comic books that helped generations of schoolchildren improve their French.Real Gauls, say the pedantic spoilsports […]

Tensions are rising again between Israel and Iran. The Islamic Republic has greeted Israel’s open discussion of attacks on its nuclear sites with a barrage of threats of violent retaliation. The Washington Post reports: Iran’s supreme leader on Thursday warned Israel and the United States that any attack on the country’s controversial nuclear program would […]

The ever-prescient Joel Kotkin has a great essay on Vietnam over at the American. Vietnam, Kotkin suggests, has not only grown into an important player in the geopolitical competition under way in Asia but is emerging as one of Asia’s most promising economies: This combination of a growing and skilled workforce represents the same combination […]

More warning signs from Argentina: The WSJ reports: A recent flurry of government measures to restrain foreign currency purchases haven’t succeeded in stemming a slow but steady drain on the central bank’s dollar reserves, making Argentine savers even more uneasy in the process.As it tries to prop up the peso, the Central Bank has been losing […]

Is it the second coming of Bill Clinton? President Obama seems to be embracing Clinton’s strategy of using popular but insignificant government actions to bolster his image and appeal to bipartisanship in the lead up to 2012.On Tuesday, it was stricter oversight of the Head Start preschool program for low-income children. On Wednesday, Obama signed […]

Here’s one green initiative Via Meadia supports: tackling the global problem of overfishing. The depletion of key species threatens the global food supply (and a vital source of protein for the poor) and given the speed at which overfished species can collapse it is the single most urgent environmental problem before us. As the NYT […]

Did Qaddafi die to save Assad and Ahmadinejad? It certainly looks like China and Russia regret allowing NATO to bomb Libya. Too much Western meddling in the Middle East has not made either of the two Security Council veto wielders happy. They will not repeat their mistake in Syria or Iran.NATO intervened in Libya to […]

The crisis in the EU has moved through several stages.  In the initial stage, it was a crisis of small peripheral economies: Ireland, Portugal, Greece.  The question then was whether the crisis would spread from the small fry to Spain. If it was a small fry problem, Europe could solve it with the back of […]