Today is the first day of the new school year at Via Meadia; I am heading tonight from the stately Mead manor in glamorous and giant-rat free Queens for whatever Tropical Storm Irene spared of the rustic Mead hideaway in the rolling hunt country of Dutchess County.  The grand strategy and American foreign policy courses […]

Some good news for Chinese miners and their families today is also good news about the growing importance of public opinion in that technically Communist country.From the VOA: Rescuers have pulled 22 Chinese coal miners from a flooded underground pit in north China where they were trapped for a week.Chinese news media reported the miners […]

The government of India announced this week that it “agreed in principle” to the anti-corruption plan put forward by Anna Hazare, a modern-day civil disobedience campaigner in the mode of Mahatma Gandhi.  Hazare’s  twelve-day fast gripped the imagination of everyone in India who follows politics and was the culmination of weeks of demonstrations against corruption […]

Prime Minister Erdogan announced yesterday that Turkey would reimburse religious minorities whose property was confiscated, destroyed or sold by the government since 1936. It is an important gesture by the Turkish government, which still has a long journey to make before coming to terms with minorities and Turkey’s turbulent history. The New York Times has […]

With Rick Perry the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, Democrats have been eager to paint the Texas governor as the second coming of his gubernatorial predecessor, George W. Bush. That is an attractive option for Dem strategists — but it is very unlikely to work. An insightful Washington Post piece describes how Perry has for […]

Want to get paid to do nothing? Go work for the US Postal Service. According to a new report and subsequent story in the Washington Post, in the first six months of 2011, the USPS paid $4.3 million in compensation to workers on “standby time” – work hours where, due to low mail volume, employees […]

Confused about national debt: how much we owe and to whom?  Try this short and clear John Steele Gordon’s piece in the WSJ today.Gordon writes: The total national debt of the United States is the sum of all federal bills, notes and bonds that have been issued by the Treasury and not yet redeemed. The […]

Mickey Kaus has a list of the things President Obama could have done differently throughout his presidency. Take a look here.Ezra Klein provides us with a progressive’s surprisingly substantial list of what, from a liberal viewpoint, are the good things Washington has accomplished since Obama moved in: Indeed, if you had taken me aside in […]

Via old WRM colleague and CFR China fellow Elizabeth Economy comes this link to an English language version of a Chinese editorial on Xinhuanet helpfully explaining to the next Japanese prime minister how his country can contribute to harmonious China-Japan relations: To improve the relationship between the world’s second and third biggest economies, Noda’s cabinet […]

Thirty years ago Nigerian economic troubles would have been quickly blamed on World Bank and general imperialist meddling in domestic affairs, but today that is no longer the case. Poor banking policies and a corrupt bureaucracy are homegrown issues, and Nigerians know that the most important limits on their growth are domestic. The FT reported earlier […]