There may be good reasons to close down Guantanamo, but that’s no simple task, and the both President and the country have more urgent problems.

Adam Garfinkle is participating in an Ask Me Anything on reddit today at 2pm EDT. He’ll be fielding questions about the Syrian conflict. Stop by and ask questions!

A new poll finds that Americans who stay informed about politics believe the world has gotten more complicated over the last decade. Gentry liberals try to explain this away by accusing partisans like the Koch brothers of willfully distorting what are in truth simple matters. But it is far more reasonable to be confused during this age of uncertainty and anxiety than to believe that everything is crystal clear.

Call it for what it is: an old fashioned party purge. 250,000 communist officials have been caught up so far in a massive effort to impose central control on local officials, with signs now that the purge could be catching Chinese diplomats in its sweep.

Sisi is making progress to improve the Egyptian economy, but even if he can restore order, the fundamentals of the economy are still broken.

Europeans’ confidence in the present and future strength of their economy has tanked, both as a function of the fallout from the crisis in Ukraine and from the news of stagnant Eurozone growth last quarter.

The United States looks ready to surpass Saudi Arabia as the number one producer of liquid petroleum for the first time in some 23 years. Who saw this coming?

After an ISIS ally in Algeria released a video of the beheading of a French national, French Muslims have gone into high gear in condemning ISIS. This is the best way to dissuade those sympathetic to ISIS and to forestall a backlash against ordinary Muslims.

On Sunday, Swiss voters handily rejected a proposal to scrap their private health care system in favor of a single-payer scheme. The defense offered of the current system seems sound in general, though it didn’t take rising costs seriously enough.

Drilling productivity in Texas’s Eagle Ford formation continues to improve, as drillers perfect their techniques and get more oil out of every well.