Statistics on poverty in the developing world are always vague, often fudged, and usually useless.I remember, years ago, standing in the largest slum in Nairobi. Miserable, informal huts stretched into the distance. Countless children played in open sewers; vast hordes of people trudged towards their jobs, or towards something. Smoke from cookfires hung over the scene. […]

After years of triumphant predictions that their country would join the euro in 2011, the Poles seem to be backing away from the once coveted currency. The year passed by without serious talks about joining the Eurozone, and now the same policymakers who boldly predicted a Polish future within the euro have become more measured […]

European greens took a hit this month when China retaliated against the EU’s carbon trading scheme for airlines by freezing purchases from several European aerospace companies. Now India is piling on. New Delhi is set to force Indian airlines to withhold carbon emissions details with the EU and to forbid the purchase of any of […]

In his nationally televised farewell address last week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao urged his country to safeguard its tremendous economic gains by adopting a more liberal political structure. Failure to do so, warned Wen, could cause the country to descend into the chaos of another Cultural Revolution. The next day, in timing that was almost […]

Foreign Affairs, the banner publication of the Council of Foreign Relations, carries in its March-April 2012 issue, an interesting article on religion and politics in the United States. It is by two prominent political scientists, David Campbell (Notre Dame) and Robert Putnam (Harvard). Their title is “God and Caesar in America: Why Mixing Religion and […]

When horrible things happen, like the terror attack on a Jewish school in southern France on Monday, our emotions churn and sometimes get the better of our capacity for reason. One commentator, an old friend who will remain nameless, blames the slimy subterranean anti-Semitism of contemporary Europe––much of the time masquerading in anti-Israel drag––for supplying […]

The conventional wisdom today holds that deep splits between conservatives and liberals have paralyzed the United States government. The country needs major changes, fast, writers like Tom Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum say in their recent book That Used to Be Us, but polarized politics have stopped change dead in its tracks.Actually, the situation is a little […]

The Washington Post is following a story that will sound all too familiar to many Catholics: the sexual abuse of young children in Baltimore’s Orthodox Jewish community. In the new documentary, Standing Silent, Phil Jacobs, himself a victim of sexual abuse in the Orthodox community, has set out to chronicle the stories of similar victims […]

[iframe src=’https://apps.the-american-interest.com/campaign/index-embed-320.php’ width=’100%’ height=’430px’]Our electoral map, updated above with the latest data, shows that President Obama is in a pretty good position for re-election at the moment. This partly reflects the recent economic improvement, as well as public discontent with the GOP. It is also due to the fact that the Republican candidates have been […]

Via Meadia commented this morning on Jeffrey Goldberg’s report that senior Israeli officials are increasingly confident of the success of an attack on Iran’s nuclear program. Goldberg is one of the top American reporters on Israel and the Middle East, and his column appeared after he spent last week in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. His reporting should […]