The world is trying to figure out who rules Egypt following the surprise dismissals/resignations of former chief military leader and defense minister Hussein Tantawi, Lt. General Sami Anan, the military chief of staff, and the heads of the three armed services.As the Wall Street Journal reports, President Morsi announced the dismissals and issued a statement […]

At a handsome new building on Hainan Island, the headquarters of the National Institute for South China Sea Studies, a video is played to visitors. As Jane Perlez writes for the NYT: The video says that China enjoys maritime rights over “a vast area” of the South China Sea, though it does not specify how much. […]

With WRM traveling in India, Via Meadia’s guest bloggers were contributing essays. Adam Garfinkle wrote about the meaning of the Arab Spring late last week. Roger Berkowitz looked at the latest report from bond maven Bill Gross, who suggests that the expected return on stocks of 6.6%—an accepted benchmark among financial planners—is merely a historical […]

With Governor Romney’s selection of Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, the vague contours of the presidential race have suddenly become sharper. Up until now, partly because Romney’s image has been so fuzzy, we were looking at a referendum on President Obama rather than a clear-cut contest between political philosophies. Now, given Ryan’s […]

FT: The International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, said on Friday that last month Iraq produced more than 3m barrels a day, the highest since the US-led invasion nearly a decade ago. At the same time, Iranian oil output fell below the 3m b/d level for the first time in more than 20 […]

WRM was interviewed on Hyderabad’s HMTV News by the channel’s chief editor K. Ramachandra Murthy yesterday evening. The interview is split by commercials which do not appear to be skippable, so keep watching to see the whole thing.Update: YouTube clip here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwz4vNbEhIU 

The indispensable Joel Kotkin recently wrote a new piece about the future of suburbs, and his commentary paints a very clear picture of why, despite its eulogizers, suburban life will live on and even thrive in the coming decades: All 15 of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas of the past decade—led by places like Las Vegas, Raleigh, […]

Via Meadia has argued that there is a perverse linkage between public sector unions, state pension funds, and Wall Street investment banking; a new study from two Maryland think tanks confirms it, finding that not only are state pension funds grossly underperforming, but much of the returns are also going to Wall Street firms rather than pensioners: According […]

This week we’re one step closer to a total revolution in transportation: the prototypes of Google’s self-driving car have traversed 300,000 miles without a single accident (the few exceptions were due to human meddling). Lucky Google employees now use the computer-controlled cars on their daily commute, and as soon as the engineers fine tune the vehicles’ […]

The news that Fareed Zakaria has apologized for plagiarizing a portion of his column at Time magazine and been suspended from both Time and CNN comes as a shock. I’ve known Fareed for many years and have a hard time believing that he would do anything as wrong or as dumb as deliberately appropriating someone […]