Liberal Talk Radio

How did Malawi end its chronic food shortage issues? Funny you should ask: Over the past 20 years, the World Bank and some rich nations Malawi depends on for aid have periodically pressed this small, landlocked country to adhere to free market policies and cut back or eliminate fertilizer subsidies, even as the United States [...]

Smart words from our SecDef: “We are miserable at communicating to the rest of the world what we are about as a society and a culture, about freedom and democracy, about our policies and our goals,” he said. “It is just plain embarrassing that Al Qaeda is better at communicating its message on the Internet [...]

The Norwegian diaspora in the upper Midwest loses a point of pride when Norway closes its consulate in Minneapolis. But give it to the Norwegians themselves for an underwhelming, if charming, show of class: Wegger Christian Strommen, the recently appointed Norwegian ambassador, said no one was abandoning the Midwest. “We’re not going to leave,” Mr. [...]

It’s like pre-grunge America circa 1987, except with much higher stakes: Marxists once referred to religion as the opium of the people, but in today’s China it is the music promoted on state-monopolized radio that increasingly claims that role. China’s leader, Hu Jintao, has talked since he assumed power five years ago about “building a [...]

Mongolia is set to receive $285 million in U.S. aid via the Millenium Challenge account, which may well be the only good idea to come out of 8 years of the Bush Administration. The program gives money to countries who promise to enact pro-democracy reforms. It is difficult, however, to avoid snarkiness after reading this [...]

sigh A Vatican official suspended after being caught on hidden camera making advances to a young man says he is not gay and was only pretending to be gay as part of his work. In an interview published Sunday, Monsignor Tommaso Stenico told La Repubblica daily he frequented online gay chat rooms and met with [...]

Man, if you ever thought that it was a bad idea to give China the Olympics in 2008, it’s certainly not the case anymore. The games are providing all sorts of leverage against the Chinese, including helping us save Darfur. The international community is also using the Olympics to make China clean up its pollution [...]

Or maybe it’s the equivalent of quickly filling in “Cs” in the remaining blank bubbles of your SAT answer sheet. Israel/Palestine — done: President Bush announced an initiative on Monday to shore up the Palestinian president and to begin building a Palestinian state, signaling that his administration will use its remaining months to make a [...]

For all the saber-rattling towards Iran coming from Dick Cheney and his ilk in recent months, it’s worth putting the country in context. Fareed Zakaria does this in his excellent Newsweek cover story on post-Bush foreign policy: No country has caused greater panic among American elites—of both parties. There are many influential voices arguing for [...]

You down with OBC? Yeah, you know me: They burned buses during the morning rush hour. They threw stones at trains packed with passengers and at the police. By Monday evening, after a week of violent protests that began in tourist-friendly Rajasthan State and ended up here unsettling the nation’s capital, the Gujjars got their [...]