All the newspapers reported the Syrian downing of a Turkish military jet yesterday off the Syrian coast. And all the papers as well as the electronic media have reported the joint Syrian–Turkish effort to locate the pilots, and the various statements of the two sides about what happened and who is to blame for it.There […]

Jim Hoagland’s commentary on Kofi Annan and his Syria peace mission is worth a brief remark. Hoagland defends Annan’s tactics, which he associates with the “Yemeni variant” method of getting rid of Bashir al-Assad. The key, Hoagland contends, is not persuading Assad himself, because everyone knows, Annan included, that that isn’t going to work. The […]

In my last post, I mentioned finding relatively few nits to pick with the Times and Post coverage of Egypt last weekend. That wasn’t the case, however, with one of yesterday’s op-eds, the one by David Ignatius discussing the nature of national security leaks. Ignatius’s topic is the new book by David Sanger of the […]

Construction has been one of the main drivers of China’s economic growth, responsible for roughly 15 percent of GDP in recent years. But as the Financial Times notes, China’s housing market has two faces: a frothy bubble in the biggest cities, where house prices are out of reach for all but the wealthiest Chinese, and hangover and […]

After discussing the conflict in Syria with President Barack Obama at the G-20 Summit this week (Zaman), Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan issued fresh calls for action against the regime (Radikal). Three days later, spokesman for Turkey’s Foreign Ministry, Selcuk Ünal, denied claims published in the New York Times that Ankara had paid for shipments […]

I had planned to spend most of yesterday, Sunday, working in the garden, particularly harvesting and culling our plums. I have three trees: two standard purple, and one golden blush Japanese hybrid. But it got hot, I got most of the work done, and I couldn’t help but read the Sunday papers. And doing so, […]

The Egyptian People have spoken, and the military has dutifully recognized Mohammed Morsi as the country’s first democratically elected president.The timing of this announcement (and the long delay while ballots were, ahem, processed) is indicative of a calculated political move by the ruling generals. It is likely that the military and the Morsi camp talked […]

Is America “pivoting” in Asia, or “rebalancing?” This is the kind of question that keeps bureaucrats writing long memos, but in the real world the labels are less important than the facts. In his recent speech at the Shangri-La Security Dialogue in Singapore, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta adopted the term “rebalancing” to denote Washington’s enhanced […]

In most western countries, central banks are, at least in theory, wholly divorced from the political process. Central bankers are selected to terms far longer than that of the average politician—and they are typically allowed to oversee numerous changes in political leadership during their time at the helm—in order to insulate them from the rough […]

Our weekend forecast is looking good: Syria shooting down a Turkish fighter jet appears unlikely to spark an international intervention as the EU and NATO nations urge caution from the Turks: “We will be obviously looking to Turkey to be restrained in its response” —Catherine Ashton, the EU’s foreign policy chief. “Military intervention in Syria […]