WRM has an op-ed in the WSJ on how al-Qaeda remains a serious threat to the US even after its failures in Iraq and the death of bin Laden: At this stage, the terrain favors America’s enemies. In places like the wide swath of Africa’s Sahel region, and in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, it is […]

Decades of incompetence and corruption in Detroit have led the city to the brink of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history—yet the private sector is booming. Some might attribute this discrepancy to poor management on the part of the city government, but a recent piece in the NYT takes a different approach, bemoaning the plight of […]

Over at the New York Times, Erik Olsen reports on a new visual amplification process with lots of applications, including checking premature babies’ pulses without touching them: A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that […]

Catching up on some stuff I don’t want to slip by:The most important news of the past few days is arguably contained in a somewhat-buried article in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth and C.J. Chiver, entitled “Seized Chinese Weapons Raise Concerns on Iran.”  The subtitle gives a hint of one of the […]

There is a rare gem in Sunday’s New York Times in the business section.  Former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, Dr. Christina Romer, has provided a balanced honest, accurate and concise summary of the arguments concerning the minimum wage. Given that a significant rise in the minimum wage was one of President Obama’s main […]

Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lived up to its name on Sunday when nearly 5,000 party members unanimously voted to pave the way for key reforms to the country’s sluggish state-run energy industry. The FT reports: Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) members convened for their national assembly agreed on Sunday to open the possibility of […]

Yesterday, Vice President Biden essentially threatened war with Iran. The US goal is “to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, period, end of discussion. Prevent, not contain, prevent!” Biden snapped to resounding applause. “The President of the United States cannot, and does not, bluff. President Barack Obama is not bluffing,” he said.Biden’s speech at the annual AIPAC conference in […]

Gideon Rachman argues in his latest column that despite tough times in Europe the continent is electing comedians, not fascists, to power. There’s something to the trend he’s identified: it isn’t the 1930s anymore, and we aren’t seeing the rise of thugs and genocidaires (except maybe in Greece). Rachman: Italy’s regional separatists, the Northern League, […]

A green activist named Chen Yuqian claims to have been beaten by a group of forty thugs for “using the internet” to publicize pollution in the Zhejiang province where he lives. We reported on a Chinese entrepreneur’s $32,000 offer to a local environmental official to swim in a polluted river; emboldened by the creativity of this […]

Employers are increasingly disappointed by the graduates available for hire, according to a survey conducted by The Chronicle and American Public Media’s Marketplace: Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And […]