After stalling for months on the construction of the Keystone Pipeline, President Obama has partially given in to his critics, pledging to expedite the approval of the southern portion of the project.  A new Gallup poll helps explain this new sudden reversal: Americans overwhelmingly approve of the pipeline, by a margin of 57 percent to […]

Israeli policymakers and analysts are increasingly in agreement that Assad eventually will fall, and that his ouster will be a net benefit for Israel—no matter who succeeds him. AI board member Itamar Rabinovich was quoted in the FT explaining Israel’s shifting perspective on their nettlesome neighbor: A few years ago, the Israeli outlook would have been different. There was a […]

Rhode Island took a major step forward in its fight against big blue on Thursday, announcing a new plan that will give local mayors much more leeway to reform the state pension plans that are driving many municipalities to the brink of bankruptcy. Boston.com reports that  Governor Lincoln Chafee, an Independent, plans to allow localities […]

Thousands of Brazilian schoolchildren now wear uniforms with computer chips embedded in the fabric. The chips send text messages to parents notifying them when their child enters school, or doesn’t.In Japan, new surveillance cameras can scan 36 million faces in mere seconds.In December 2010, Iran spent $130 million to purchase phone-monitoring technology from China. The state telecom […]

How do politicians in a democracy balance domestic politics and international realities?They juggle, and that is what India did at the UN’s Human Rights Council vote on (credibly) alleged war crimes and other violations of the rights of the Tamil minority on Sri Lanka. India voted for the resolution, pleasing the 60 million Tamils who […]

Following a wave of recent raids on abortion providers in the UK, the British Department of Health has reached a shocking conclusion: More than one in five may be breaking the law. The Telegraph reports that of the 250 providers investigated in this week’s raid, more than 50 were cited for falsifying consent forms and […]

Earlier this month, we covered news that half of British nursing home patients were being denied basic health services as a result of inefficiencies in Britain’s massive health bureaucracy. Yet before we gloat that such things would never happen here, the New York Times has a story on a new report from New York state claiming […]

Longtime watchers of Argentina have seen this movie before: in the aftermath of a mighty economic crash, an Argentine government embraces an unorthodox set of economic polices. For a time, they work—partly because the crash was so huge that some kind of recovery was inevitable and partly because Argentina’s rich natural resource endowment (fertile soil, […]

In the challenge to President Obama’s signature health care law, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), the Supreme Court  faces a daunting series of issues. The unprecedented schedule of oral arguments—a total of six hours—bespeaks the Court’s willingness to confront those issues squarely. The most historic decision since Roe v. Wade could well […]

Both Russia and the West appear to be losing confidence in their respective “allies” in Syria. In what the Wall Street Journal described as “a rare sign of international unity over the standoff”, the United Nations Security Council has endorsed a plan to end the bloodshed in Syria: The statement supports a six-point plan by U.N.-Arab League […]