Brazil is of course happy to let foreign companies invest in its vast but difficult to access offshore oil reserves. China is interested in that oil — perhaps too interested. The FT recently reported this story: China’s second largest state-controlled oil major Sinopec has signed a $5.2bn deal to buy 30 per cent of the Brazilian […]

I have some thoughts on the bitter contest between France and Germany to control the future of Europe that is at the heart of the EU’s failure to master its financial crisis in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. Germany and France are locked into their most bitter struggle since the panzers exploded out of the […]

Obamacare isn’t dead, but the NYT is already writing its obituary. Two years ago, governors who filed lawsuits challenging the healthcare bill’s constitutionality were dismissed as Red State extremists and ideologues with names like “Butch” Otter. Hadn’t they read the Commerce Clause, the bien pensant press would ask.  What kind of Flat Earthers were these […]

One of my admittedly arcane little hobbies is to discover behavior in our avowedly secular society here in 21st-century America that looks, feels and quacks not like a duck, but like what in earlier ages would have been recognized as obviously religious in character.When I describe a behavior as religious in character I mean something […]

In more ways than one, Brussels is a fitting choice for capital of the European Union. Aside from its central location and placement in the middle of the Germany-France-UK cockpit which has shaped European politics and conflict for 500 years, Belgium shares many other qualities with the EU as a whole: internal cultural conflict, an […]

Via Meadia posted an essay not long ago on identity conflict, calling it the ‘scariest thing in the world’. Nationalism and conflict between peoples, cultures, and races over the same space tore Europe and the Middle East apart in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; Africa and Asia are now starting to see the same types […]

In the wake of the IAEA’s damning report on Iran’s nuclear ambitions, announced US plans to sell cluster bombs to Arab countries, tightening sanctions against Iran’s top (and only) ally Syria and Israel’s public military deliberations, Iran’s opponents are becoming more united while Iran continues to divide.  The WSJ reports: A group of Iranian dissidents […]

Anthony Grafton has a thoughtful piece in the most recent issue of the New York Review of Books that reviews a series of recent books on the university system and draws some sobering conclusions. For most of them [today’s students], in the end, what the university offers is not skills or knowledge but credentials: a […]

More big news on the great game: Australia has just announced plans to begin supplying uranium to India, breaking with a years-long ban on the practice. The FT reports: Australia’s government will push to lift a ban on uranium exports to India in an attempt to put its relationship with the rising Asian power on […]

The world’s eyes are riveted on the car crash in Europe, but the troubles in China could be even larger.  An IMF report out this week adds yet another voice to the chorus warning that some very important pieces of China’s boom rest on shaky foundations.  As the NYT reports: In the 125-page report on […]