This week there have been many reports about the change in the troop withdrawal date. The New York Times reported that the Obama administration is changing its policy to include a withdrawal period at the end of 2014. This month, senior White House officials have cited 2014 as the new transfer date. Such an announcement … Read more
COVERS SECTION: No Grad Left Behind?: The State of Higher Education in America Class Conflict: The debate over class-based affirmative action. By Peter Bozzo and Eric Smith. Dunce Ex Machina: U.S. high schools failing to prepare grads. By Caroline Cox and Kaiyang Huang. Tenure Tune-Up: Changes needed to modernize tenure. By Eric Hendey and Simon … Read more
The last month has seen a surge in “democratic” elections around the world. Headliners like the recent election of Dilma Rousseff in emerging Brazil, the massive midterm elections of the US, and the corrupt and violent polls in Myanmar have taken center stage, but voting in Tanzania, Cote d’Iviore, and Guinea has also taken place. … Read more
Two months ago, just when the Senkaku incident between Japan and China seemed to reach a deadlock, China played an unexpected card. Industries in Japan reported that China began halting exports of rare earth, a vital component in electronics manufacturing, a move that caused Japan to cave in. While Chinese officials have emphatically denied that … Read more
November 2nd, 2010. Election Day. It was a day that Democrats across the country drank away their sorrows as they suffered massive losses in the House (64 seats) and Senate (6 seats). Yet, even as a sea of red spread across the map, California remained blue. Democrats Jerry Brown—in the governor’s race—and Barbara Boxer—in the … Read more
My last post for this blog was an analysis of Obama on the campaign trail and the work that he was doing to ensure that Democrats across the country got elected. I assigned the President the title “Campaigner-in-Chief.” Indeed, because of Obama’s tour around the nation from coast to coast, this name was deserved due … Read more
This column first appeared in the Harvard Independent. In the weeks before Election Day, we were besieged by polling data, breathlessly conveyed as breaking news by unimaginative journalists. This might seem rather benign, a mild diversion for political obsessives. But I’m not sure polls are quite so innocent. We either need to train a more … Read more
Religious plurality comes in many shapes and sizes. Take the case of Israel, often dismissed by foreign observers as simply ‘the Jewish state’. The lion’s share of international focus on Israel stems from conflict between the Jewish majority and an Arab minority. Yet outside mixed-ethnic areas like Jerusalem and the Upper Galilee, most Israelis don’t … Read more
One thing is clear, the Pentagon isn’t reading this blog. Last week I wrote about the ills of contract spending in Afghanistan. This week the Pentagon announced that it has awarded a 630 million dollar contract to Mina Corp, a company currently under investigation by Congress. The Afghan contractor was given a deal to supply … Read more
Hailed by President Obama as “[t]he most popular politician on earth,” President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil is stepping down from his post after two terms following the Oct. 31 election of Dilma Rousseff, whom the president endorsed as his successor. Barred by the constitution from seeking a consecutive third term, President Lula … Read more