Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe backtracked yesterday on previous comments he made in which he suggested that he did not agree with the famous 1995 apology by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama. Murayama apologized to neighboring countries like China and Korea for Japanese aggression during World War II. Abe, a nationalist, has said on several occasions that he might […]

There is a lot of bad blood between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi form of Islam, and those tensions are likely to become more visible as the Brotherhood continues to gain influence in the Arab world.“The Brotherhood has done great damage to Saudi Arabia,” the late Saudi Crown Prince Nayef Bin Abdel-Aziz said after the […]

Less than half the money exacted from Illinois taxpayers to pay for roads is actually used to pay for roads. The Illinois Auditor General has found that, of the $5.7 billion in the state’s road fund over the past two years, $2.7 billion went to cover salaries at the Illinois Department of Transportation, bond debt […]

Militiamen murder women and children and extinguish entire family lines. A rebel commander executes a dozen men on video. Another eats the heart of an enemy. “These are the images of Syrian conflict,” Reuters reports, “the first war in which the prevalence of camera phones and Internet access has allowed hundreds of gruesome war crimes to […]

Christie’s auction house in New York raked in $495 million in art sales Wednesday, setting the record for the the largest single evening of sales in auction history. The evening’s sales featured art by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The art market has been seeing high returns for several years now, but industry experts […]

We noted last weekend that Benghazigate had finally broken through the first firewall and become “legitimated” by the MSM as a real scandal. The press has also been on top of the IRS/Tea Party outrages, for the most part, but now we’re learning that that scandal may run even deeper than reported. Political Wire picked […]

The Obama administration may be softening its stance on fracking.The Interior Department has just released long-awaited revisions to proposed rules governing fracking on federal land. The new rules are meant to replace a thirty-year-old set of regulations that are now hopelessly out of step with current technology.The administration’s first round of proposed updates last year disappointed […]

Antipathy between Sunni and Shi’a radicals in and around the Syrian cauldron is growing rapidly, lately manifested in the battle of the shrines—wherein Sunnis destroy Shi’a holy sites (most recently one not too far from Damascus) and proudly disinter centuries-dead bodies (or the dust thought to have once been bodies), and the Iranian regime threatens […]

It’s no fun blogging at moving targets.Since I tried on May 8 to make the simple point that Gregory Hicks’s testimony was being used for partisan purposes, and hence deflected attention from the Obama Administration’s real, seminal errors on Libya—which date to March 2011, not September 2012—some interesting developments have taken place.It is now clear, for example, […]

Secretary Kerry’s announcement of a peace conference on Syria only ten days ago has been met with a series of remarkable provocations from the Russians: First, they refused to halt the sale of a sophisticated anti-aircraft weapons system to Assad, one which would make the imposition of a no-fly zone more difficult. Second, they expelled […]