The international conference on climate change attracted thousands of delegates from almost 200 nations. The Conference of the Parties21, so named for the parties that signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992 and had come to Paris for what was their 21st conference, came to an…
Michelle Obama went to Qatar to give a speech on girls education. There, the first lady of the United States complained about growing up as a girl in America.
We have been hearing, for so long now, that the end is nigh in the crisis of the Greek economy that it is hard to take another such warning seriously. The problem of Greece, like so many others, seems to have no end, no resolution and, even, no point. Unless, that is, you are a citizen of Greece.…
Everyone is talking about the New York Times piece exposing how utterly wrong, willfully blind, and insanely dangerous Paul Ehrlich is, and has been, for the last forty-seven years. There’s video, too.
In his weekly newsletter, the boss, just back from the Munich Security Conference, shares his big takeaways:
It’s us against them—an American economy on the upswing vs. a global economy that definitely is not. Last year the U.S. economy added almost 3 million jobs, the largest number in fifteen years. The headline unemployment rate is down to 5.6 percent, and the so-called U-6 unemployment rate, which…
The U.S. State Department recently awarded a contract worth $541,250 to a foreign research firm to conduct public opinion surveys as part of an "Arab omnibus study" in at least eight foreign countries beginning this month. Significant portions of the justification documents were redacted, including…
President Barack Obama addressed the growing Ebola crisis today in the Roosevelt Room of the White House.
Speaking at the John F. Kennedy Forum at Harvard Kennedy School in Boston, Massachusetts last night, Vice President Joe Bidengave an extensive rundown of foreign policy challenges and crises that the world and the Obama administration are facing today. Although the vice president expressed…
The world is exploding, as Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said last week. But President Obama is going golfing -- again.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed piece of August 6 about “the surge of poisonous anti-Semitism around the world, particularly in Europe,” Andrew Nagorski had the temerity to note that “the president [Obama] has not prominently addressed the subject of rising anti-Semitism in Europe, much less its…
Fresh off a trip to India and Australia, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel addressed a group of Marines in San Diego, California Tuesday, and may have delivered a line that will show up in Republican campaign ads this election cycle. After updating the troops on some issues in the Pacific region and…
And we thought the bad old days of oil shocks were over. Embargoes, price spikes, gasoline lines in America, a sweater-bedecked president ordering the end of hot water in many facilities, collapsing retail sales as high gasoline and energy prices hit stores as much as a big tax increase would,…
Hillary Clinton says that the "American political system is probably the most difficult, even brutal, in the world." She made the comments in a recent interview:
These days, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has time on its hands. So until we resume sending people out to explore the cosmic frontier, the bureaucracy is, as Alex Brown of the National Journal writes, keeping busy by funding and circulating studies into the:
Hard to blame anyone for wanting to get out of Washington and flee to some destination where the air is not polluted by politics. Understandable, then, that as Shane Goldmacher of Government Executive writes:
It has been 72 years and veterans of the attack are in their 90s, some of them taking tourists out to the memorial built over the sunken battleship Arizona, which is still leaking oil. Almost 1,200 men were killed and went down with that ship when a bomb found its magazine and blew it up. Total…
While Germany was engaging in peaceful elections and the United States was watching football – civilized societies being big on democratic rituals and sports – people in other parts of the world were relieving their frustrations in violence.
The United States will "close an unspecified number of embassies around the world" because of "security concerns," AFP reports. The closures will take place on Sunday.
Eliot Cohen, writing in the Wall Street Journal:
In an article titled, "Refusal to Lead," Republican senator Marco Rubio writes, "The biggest foreign policy problem facing the United States right now is not too much U.S. engagement, but the danger of a world in which we increasingly refuse to lead. There are few global challenges that can be…
Jack Lew, who has been nominated as the next treasury secretary, oversaw up as many as a hundred Cayman Island investments when he worked at Citi Bank as chief operating officer of the alternative investment services unit, SEC disclosures reveal. It has previously been reported that Lew himself had…
In a joint interview with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and President Barack Obama, Clinton reveals that Obama knew all along that expectations were set too high for him when he first came into office:
This clip from an appearance on Al Jazeera seems to suggest that Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee for secretary of defense, believes America is "the world's bully":
Or, maybe it is. In which case you should really cheer up. Getting all sulky and down in the dumps isn't going to starting adding days, weeks, months, and years to the Mayan calendar which runs out of tomorrows on the day after tomorrow (December 21, in case you are counting).
A newly released study by Transparency International finds the United States less corrupt now than it was in 2011. According to the survey's rankings, the U.S. is the 19th least corrupt country in the world this year; in 2011, the U.S. ranked 24th.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD podcast with Bill Kristol, hosted by Michael Graham:
As he showed in the final presidential debate, President Obama’s understanding of the U.S. Navy—or for that matter, any navy—is suboptimal. His explanation about Navy carriers “where planes land on them,” and “ships that go underwater, nuclear submarines,” left out the largest single group of naval…
It is not even close: In a world poll of the U.S. presidential race, President Barack Obama is the clear favorite over Governor Mitt Romney. By a margin of 50-9 percent, Obama is favored in the poll of 21,797 respondents in 21 countries around the world.
President Obama's address at the United Nations was at times eloquently aspirational, and for the most part conventionally unobjectionable. But there was one sentence that gave away the fundamental lack of seriousness of the Obama worldview: "We have begun a transition in Afghanistan, and America…
On Fox News Sunday this morning, Chris Wallace asked Robert Gibbs, "So [Obama] has time for Whoopi Goldberg, but he doesn't have time for world leaders?" The question is in reference to Obama's decision to go on The View next week, but not to meet with world leaders, including Israeli prime…
Last month in London, Mexico’s Olympic soccer team won gold by defeating its Brazilian counterpart, 2-1. The victory gave Mexico its first-ever trophy in a major international soccer tournament (apart from the 1999 Confederations Cup), and it proved that the soccer gap between Latin America’s two…
President Barack Obama awarded Presidential Medals of Freedom today at the White House to Bob Dylan John Glenn, John Paul Stevens, Madeleine Albright, Shimon Peres, Jan Karski, John Doar, William Foege, Dolores Huerta, Juliette Gordon Low, Pat Summitt, and Gordon Hirabayashi. The award is the…
As the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin writes, the Economic Freedom Network is out with its latest rankings of how countries stack up in securing economic freedom, and the United States has now fallen to 10th place in the world rankings — behind the United Kingdom. Numerically, the U.S. fell off…
Nancy Pelosi on today's vote: "What we're trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."