In the old days when times got tough, cash hungry rulers went for the monks.  Henry VIII closed the monasteries and sold off the property to his followers.  The French Revolution did the same.These days, the church doesn’t have the dough — and if it did, class action lawyers for sex abuse victims get there […]

World Bank president Robert Zoellick warns that a new recession is likely if world leaders don’t act fast. Unless the economic leadership gets ahead of the problem in its different dimensions, you’ll see the lack of confidence…spread.We are entering a “new danger zone”, he said. What we need is cooperation. This sentiment is echoed in […]

At Via Meadia I’ve argued that the Assad regime has a clear strategic plan: use what you’ve got to get what you need and forget the rest.Operationally that translates into using the (limited) forces staunchly loyal to the regime to crush the opposition one city at a time.  If the domestic opposition can’t overthrow the […]

News reports from Germany this morning suggest that faced with the stark alternatives of a breakdown in the eurozone and the flotation of “eurobonds”, euro-denominated bonds that would be jointly backed by all of the members of the zone, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats are slowly and reluctantly edging toward some form of “transfer union” in […]

The fiftieth anniversary of the construction of the Berlin Wall has brought out the red in a handful of Germans nostalgic for the good old days when people trying to flee the East German dictatorship were shot down like dogs and left to bleed to death.  Some Left Party delegates refused to observe a minute […]

San Francisco is the epitome of blue America — a city where to be a liberal is to be center right.  These days, it’s a city with a pension crisis: promising too much to city employees and paying too little into the pension fund for years leaves the city of San Francisco with a gaping […]

From The Financial Times: “The US now has information that Pakistan, particularly the ISI, gave access to the Chinese military to the downed helicopter in Abbottabad,” said one person in intelligence circles, referring to the Pakistani spy agency. The Chinese engineers were allowed to survey the wreckage and take photographs of it, as well as […]

From the Associated Press we learn that a Denver judge has thrown out a school voucher program that would have let parents use vouchers to pay tuition in private schools.  For the ACLU and other critics, this was unconstitutional because some of the schools are, gasp, religious.  To use taxpayer money to support religious schools […]

Over at Pajamas Media, Michael J. Totten has a fascinating report about the state of the Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt. The subject of the Brotherhood’s role in January’s regime-ending protests, as well as the demonstrations against the current government has long been controversial. Totten thinks the confusion may be due to ineptitude and incoherence […]

If you can’t convince people of the need for a global carbon treaty with documentaries and IPCC reports, why not try it with fiction? Rajendra Pachauri has already published Return to Almora, his steaming novel about a tin-hatted, serially sort-of-monogamous Hindu holy man/neuroscientist, but unaccountably this contribution to world literature remains bereft of an American […]