The results of Catalonia’s elections are in, and, as the polls indicated, pro-independence parties won a large majority of the seats in the regional assembly. Madrid’s spinmeisters are already working overtime to show that, through some mysterious logic, these results are really a blow to Catalonia’s independence movement.Madrid, for example, has been quick to point out […]

China is rising as a military power, but it still has a good deal to learn about great power diplomacy. Over the past two years, China has managed to blunder its way into bad relations with nearly all of its neighbors, driving them into the arms of the United States (and each other) through a […]

The biggest battle in the history of the internet looms in Dubai, as tyrranical countries and revenue hogs seek UN-sanctioned control of the information highway. The fight will take place during the 12-day conference of the International Telecommunications Union (a branch of the UN), which begins next week. The goal of the conference is to decide […]

We’ve seen more school cheating scandals than usual over the past few years, but this is the most egregious yet. A Memphis-area former assistant principal is now under investigation for running a 15-year cheating ring in which current teachers were paid to take certification tests for prospective teachers in Mississippi, Arkansas and Tennessee. The New York Times reports: […]

Arnaud Montebourg, France’s firebrand industry minister, has no love for steel giant ArcelorMittal. “We do not want ArcelorMittal in France, because they do not respect France,” he said yesterday. “The violence and the brutality of Mittal; they are going to have to pay.” He accused the company of blackmail and lying, and threatened to nationalize its French […]

Regular readers of the blog will know that we are not exactly fans of Obama’s health reform, but a new piece in the Wall Street Journal suggests that it may have a silver lining.Backers of Obamacare have argued that the changes in insurance law will make it easier to raise the Medicare eligibility age because seniors […]

California has taken some much-deserved flak on this blog and elsewhere for its woefully underfunded public pensions, and the President’s home state of Illinois has thoroughly wrecked its finances with pension stupidity, but the worst pension crisis in America is not in any of the states—it’s in Puerto Rico. The island territory has had a rough go […]

The OECD is not feeling good about the state of the developed world this morning: “The world economy is far from being out of the woods,” said the OECD’s secretary general Angel Gurria.“The US fiscal cliff, if it materialises, could tip an already weak economy into recession, while failure to solve the euro area debt […]

For the first time in decades the Japanese government has approved a military aid package to a foreign country. Japanese warships have also participated in cooperative exercises with neighboring countries, many of whom have painful memories of encounters with Japanese armed forces. The NYT has the rest of the story: And after stepping up civilian […]

Zero Hedge got us thinking about the geopolitical implications of the agricultural supply chain and how everything is changing, rapidly. Consider: Structurally, China is at a huge disadvantage as it accounts for 20% of the world’s population, but only 7% of arable land. Compare that with Brazil which has the reverse of those ratios. What […]