As was widely reported by the media both in Britain and in this country, on October 15, 2011 Occupy London (the British imitator of the Occupy Wall Street movement) put up a protest camp in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral. With more than two hundred tents in place, the camp impeded the regular activities of […]

As Via Meadia observes the slow burning resistance to the bloody regime of Butcher Assad in Syria, we’ve been bearish on his character and bullish on his strategy.  We think it’s a bad regime that deserves to fall, but that the forces trying to overturn it don’t have the ability to achieve their goals. The […]

Is it a bug or a feature?That depends on how you feel about big bureaucratic corporations taking over American health care, but the New York Times reports that the controversial health care reform act has accelerated the destruction of small medical practices at the expense of large firms.  And if the Times is right, these […]

Add another problem to Rhode Island’s lengthy list — the New York Times reports that the City of East Providence has just gone into receivership due to the usual cause, to wit: an inability to pay its bills. The state government, which is facing serious financial problems of its own, has appointed an overseer to […]

Are the “cheese eating surrender monkeys” complaining about President Obama’s alleged wimpishness on Iran?Apparently so, according to the New York Times.  Israel’s impatience with the Obama administration’s go slow approach to Iran is common knowledge. Less well-known is France’s desire for the same. In a week in which Iran’s nuclear ambitions have once again become […]

Italy has a new prime minister and they have given him an easy first assignment: save the country, fast, before the whole place goes down the tubes. The NYT has a profile of the new PM, Mario Monti: The consensus in Italy is that President Giorgio Napolitano, who nominated Mr. Monti in record time on Sunday […]

As the mess in Europe gradually gets worse week after week, we move closer and closer to the dreaded “transfer union” where a series of massive bailouts send money from the prosperous North to the collapsing South. But even as more and more observers begin to see this as the only possible outcome, powerful voices […]

There’s been a distinct uptick in stories about Iran’s nuclear program and the international tensions around it, but today there is something new.Oil prices are moving higher, and people I talk to who watch the markets closely believe that politics, not economics is driving the surge.As long as the oil prices stay flat, chatter about […]

Good news and bad news: The good news is that SAT scores for America’s lowest-achieving students are up; the bad news is that the scores for the top achieving students are down. Recently, state governments and the Department of Education have focused their attention on bringing kids who fall behind up to speed, but this […]

Taking a cue from slight upticks in the national economy, Americans are braving the damp November weather to go shopping more than at any time since last June. The FT reports: Opinion about current conditions ticked up to 76.6 from 75.1, while the gauge of expectations for the next six months jumped to 56.2 from […]