One of the byproducts of China’s rapid modernization is its increasing dependence on oil from the Middle East. China now gets about half of its oil from the Persian Gulf countries, and its never-ending thirst for crude has profound geopolitical ramifications.Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal has a neat summary highlighting the importance of […]

If you want to understand why liberalism doesn’t work very well anymore, travel up the Hudson River a few miles from New York.Mayor Bloomberg’s ban on large sodas isn’t the only thing inciting New Yorkers this week. Controversy is heating up over a bridge that maybe never should have been built.The longstanding plan to rebuild […]

To anyone struggling to make sense of the euro crisis, the FT has some helpful advice—watch Italy: Although Italy does not have Spain’s banks, Greece’s economy, or Ireland’s deficits, it is easy to forget how close to the edge Rome reached last summer under the erratic leadership of Silvio Berlusconi. It may not be an […]

Bashar al-Assad can breathe a bit easier this morning, as Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdoğan has explicitly ruled out any military retaliation after Syrian forces shot down a Turkish fighter jet last Friday.Turkey’s Today’s Zaman reports: Ankara has long been saying that the Assad regime, facing a 16-month-long uprising, has been massacring its own people and that […]

Now that the Egyptian army has signed off on Mohamed Morsi as the country’s new president, the question hanging in the air is how much authority, if any, he has—and what he’ll do with it.As things stand, Morsi has few formal powers. During its mid-election power grab, the military took control over all legislative matters […]

Fifty years ago (base 10), when I was a kid in the South, only the rich had air conditioning. Now two lawsuits are challenging the lack of air conditioning in Texas prisons: Only 21 of the 111 prisons overseen by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, the state prison agency, are fully air-conditioned. Many of […]

The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has announced a “Fortnight of Freedom” to last from June 21 to July 4. The event, based on the presupposition that religious freedom is endangered in this country, is planned as a very visible demonstration. The “Fortnight” not only ends with the celebration of the major patriotic holiday, […]

News from and excerpts of Washington Post correspondent Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s new book about the Afghanistan war are whipping around the web today. The book, released Tuesday but not yet read by Via Meadia, looks to be a sobering criticism of the way Team Obama has handled the war over the past three years.As the excerpts make clear, […]

It’s only about half over, but 2012 is already looking like a very bad year for the world economy. The measured optimism that many had going into the year has completely faded. The good signs at the end of last year turned out to be a short uptick rather than the beginning of a long-term […]

Editor’s note: The recent Supreme Court decision about Arizona’s controversial immigration control law has brought the issue of immigration back into the spotlight of American politics, and has done so in an election year. Before the Supreme Court’s ruling, which upheld the law’s most debated aspect but struck down several others, immigration issues simmered just […]