The Great Loon may be out of power, but his soldiers continue their acts of violence against civilians.  CNN has the story: Forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi are creating a humanitarian disaster in Bani Walid, the National Transitional Council’s military spokesman charged Monday.Col. Ahmed Bani told reporters that Gadhafi forces are robbing food stores, leaving […]

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. Coincidentally, in a recent issue of the German news magazine Der Spiegel, Habermas is on a […]

Most of the eyes that follow the Middle East are focused on the Palestinian bid for statehood at the UN this week; that is not the biggest question facing the region or the United States.  Egypt, Turkey, Libya, Tunisia, Palestine, Bahrain, Yemen: for now, these are sideshows.  The main event, the thing that history is […]

Something surprising happened during legislative elections in Berlin on Sunday: A scruffy bunch of young men with dreadlocks, beards, and sweatshirts became the city’s newest legislators. The NYT has the story: By winning 8.9 percent of the vote in Sunday’s election in this city-state, these political pirates surpassed — blew away, really — every expectation […]

Only six years after the resolution of its civil war, Burundi is again on edge. A bar shooting this week resulted in the deaths of at least 36 Burundians, and the violence has roots in the ongoing conflict between the governing party and the opposition. The New York Times reports: Burundian officials immediately accused an […]

Things have been heating up in the Persian Gulf over the past few months. Iranian boats and aircraft have assumed threatening positions toward American vessels, and the two sides have come close to firing on each other on a few occasions. This tension has prompted the Navy to consider a military hotline with the Islamic […]

Energy-independence types like to say that America is the Saudi Arabia of coal; developments of the past year reveal that the Americas may also be the Saudi Arabia of… oil! The NYT has a remarkable piece on the effects of new technology and massive oil discoveries throughout the Western Hemisphere. Brazil has begun building its […]

In Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, corruption of the health care system kills, directly and indirectly.  The New York Times, which deserves some applause for stepping up its India coverage despite tight budgets, has the story: The first doctor to die, a senior government health administrator, was shot on his morning walk last October by […]

Recently I posted a short piece saying that the specter of a “Christianist” takeover of the United States is a figment of overheated imaginations, mostly on the left.  Every few years a leftie journalist dabbles in right wing websites and obscure theological debates and emerges with horrifying tales of totalitarian Dominionist plots to turn the […]

William Easterly is one of the most interesting critics of the mindless NGO, feelgood development ‘consensus’ that has wasted so many tens of billions of dollars in poorly conceived foreign aid programs over recent decades.  Now he’s performed yet another important service by compiling the “Aidspeak Dictionary” that tells laypeople just what development professionals really […]