Once considered sacrosanct, the pensions of cops and firefighters are increasingly coming under the budget knife, says Reuters.Even in the recent showdown in Wisconsin, Governor Scott Walker was careful not to extend the curbing of collective bargaining rights to police and firefighters. But now dire fiscal straits across the country are threatening even the pensions […]

Are the radical Islamists winning in Tunisia?  It doesn’t sound good: Thousands of hardcore Muslims chant against Jews. Youths rampage through cities at night in protest of “blasphemous” art. A sit-in by religious students degenerates into fist fights and the desecration of Tunisia’s flag.Tunisia was the birthplace of the “Arab Spring” and it is the […]

The Romanian political mess isn’t getting better. 87 percent of the voters in a referendum on removing unpopular president Traian Basescu voted to dismiss the president, but because fewer than half of the eligible voters bothered to show up, Basescu remains president.It’s almost the worst possible result. Basescu will be further weakened by this massive […]

The Obama administration has tried to play it safe in Syria. But even a safety play has risks. The New York Times has the story: The past few months have witnessed the emergence of larger, more organized and better armed Syrian militant organizations pushing an agenda based on jihad, the concept that they have a divine […]

Leaving the wreckage of his London visit behind, Mitt Romney has gone to Jerusalem where he must hope better things await. London was a lost opportunity but ultimately unimportant; the Israel visit, however, matters much more to the ex-governor and to his campaign.The press almost always overlooks this, but the argument over Israel policy in […]

This week’s essay on the consequences of the upcoming energy revolution took on the greens—specifically the recent wail of despair from George Monbiot: “We were wrong about peak oil. There’s enough to fry us all.” Mr. Monbiot and other greens, who profess to be able to understand the maddeningly complex systems surounding the climate, nevertheless […]

Well that didn’t take long. We predicted the UN global arms treaty would fail, and it did: Negotiators at the United Nations failed to meet a Friday deadline to complete a new treaty aimed at regulating the estimated $60 billion global arms trade business, as major weapons exporting nations, including the United States, said more […]

Call it 21st-century Gunboat Diplomacy. China is turning up the heat in the South China Sea dispute, and the show of force couldn’t have come at a worse time for China’s neighbors, according to the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (h/t @LizEconomy): On Sunday (22 July), China said it would station troops at Sansha, but did not […]

In India’s northeastern Assam state, tension between Muslims and ethnic Bodo communities reached a fiery peak earlier this week. Thousands of people have fled the violence, dozens of homes have been burned, and more than 40 people have reportedly been killed. Many of the dead were found in the forest with limbs hacked off by […]

Two steps forward, one step back in Europe: after the German parliament rebuked a Cologne court’s decision to ban circumcision in Germany, an Austrian province went ahead and banned the practice. The provincial governor, Markus Wallner, said he had halted circumcisions until Austria formulated a uniform approach to the practice, a religious duty for Muslims and Jews. […]