French forces stormed Kidal and seized the airport yesterday, felling the last of the urban Islamist strongholds in Mali. But it’s too soon to celebrate, as over the past few weeks hundreds and perhaps thousands of jihadists have fled to the deserts in northern Mali to regroup and presumably plan a counter attack.The Washington Post reports: New […]

Is Big Pharma pressuring states to grant drug companies an effective monopoly on their most popular drugs? According to the NYT, Amgen and Genentech are leading a charge in many U.S. state legislatures for bills that would prevent pharmacists from selling “biosimilars”—that is, generic versions of biological drugs—in place of their brand name parents. Eight states […]

Did the Syrian opposition just blink? Opposition leader Sheik Khatib, an important cleric from Damascus, posted on his Facebook page that he was willing to talk with the Assad regime. Other opposition figures quickly distanced themselves from the Sheik’s overture, causing him to qualify his statement as “just an opinion.” And Assad is unlikely to bite, […]

Just hours after Israeli jets attacked either a convoy of trucks carrying weapons to Hezbollah or a scientific research facility outside Damascus (depending on whom you ask), Iran’s foreign minister blasted Israel, saying “There is no doubt that this aggression is part of a Western and Zionist strategy to push aside the success of the […]

Once again civilization survives barbarism: Timbuktu’s ancient literary treasures were not destroyed after all. In a classic example of how the uncertainty of war can make bad reporters of us all, local accounts apparently vastly exaggerated the damage done to the city’s legendary library. Not only was the place not burned to the ground—as the city’s […]

Does the American middle class (and by extension, the middle class in other advanced democracies) have a future in a post-blue world? That is the basic question at the heart of American politics;. As I’ve noted, 4.0 liberals think that it doesn’t, and think that the defense of the blue social model is the only […]

The six million Jews you thought were killed in Europe? They actually moved to America and died in car wrecks, and the U.S. simply invented the “Holocaust” to justify bombing Japan. At least that’s the word from the Muslim Brotherhood’s new press man in Egypt, who claimed in 2010: “The myth of the Holocaust is […]

Two of America’s most powerful lobbies, oil and agricuture, are squaring off this week over the future of biofuels. A new study released yesterday by an affiliate of the American Petroleum Institute suggests that E15, a biofuel/gasoline blend, is bad for your car. The Wall Street Journal has more: Auto makers and oil companies stepped […]

We’ve heard time and time again that small businesses are “the engines of job growth” in America. This isn’t completely wrong, but the Wall Street Journal has looked more closely and found that neither small businesses nor large businesses are responsible for most job growth. Start-ups are:  The comparative stability of larger companies helps refute the […]

The al-Qaeda allied militias who took over northern Mali initially tried to win the hearts and minds of the local population. AQIM leaders handed out vegetables and preached Islamic values. The locals, in turn, were encouraged to join up with the newcomers, many of whom were foreign fighters from as far away as Pakistan.But it […]