As regular readers know, I’m in Yaroslavl, Russia this week for the Russian government’s Global Social Forum.  It’s been a solemn time; yesterday a plane crashed at the local airport killing more than 40 people including the very well regarded and well liked local hockey team.  The facility hosting the conference is the hockey team’s […]

Tomorrow President Obama will stand before Congress and put forward a jobs plan. A real jobs plan? One that will work? One that learns from past mistakes? David Wessell, the WSJ‘s economics editor, thinks so: The package, fashioned over the past couple of weeks, draws from two lessons the president has learned in the past […]

A environmental theory that proposes a cause of global warming unrelated to greenhouse gasses is undergoing something of a renaissance at CERN, the world’s most important research facility for questions involving things that are very small and very fast. As the WSJ reports: [There is] another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from […]

Citing a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts the Washington Post is out to panic the millennials a story about how a wave of downward mobility driving Americans out of the middle class.  It turns out a number of Americans whose parents were middle class don’t do as well once they are out on […]

While the climate change movement has been chasing down one blind alley after another for the last twenty years, other environmental issues have gotten short shrift.The most urgent problem is the unsustainable assault on the world’s fragile fish stocks. As a paper in Marine Policy and a subsequent report in the Washington Post tell us, […]

“We should resign ourselves to the fact that the ‘new normality’ is characterised by volatility and uncertainty.” So says the CEO of Deutsche Bank.One element of that volatility and uncertainty — the possibility of heavy losses for holders of sovereign bonds issued by cash-strapped European countries — could lead to the collapse of a number […]

Syria could be next in the Arab Spring, but judging from life in Damascus, you wouldn’t guess it. The NYT explains: DAMASCUS, Syria — As protests broke out across a restive Syria on a recent Sunday, and crowds were dispersed yet again by gunfire that left many dead, the conversation in the capital dwelled not […]

Bill Keller, executive editor of The New York Times, is no longer content to preside over what many still regard as the world’s greatest newspaper. (I don’t, but I read it every day, not because of its pervasive liberal bias, but because it continues to offer the best international coverage of any American newspaper.)  Keller […]

Those who truly loathe and despise the environmental movement will enjoy this New York Times account of green activists squirming in impotent fury over President Obama’s latest “betrayal,” last week’s decision to stiff environmentalists over promised plans to tighten nationwide ozone emissions standards. The question for environmentalists became, what to do next? ‘There is shock and […]

Quite possibly not — in which case Europe as we know it could be lost.  The FT reports: If Italy becomes infected…the Eurozone has neither the financial nor the political resources to go to Rome’s rescue. Italy must inoculate itself against the sovereign debt virus. Yet an incompetent political system has left it paralyzed in […]