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In any democratic election, opposition parties always criticize the policies of the incumbent. This tactic is especially true when the country is involved in a long and costly war.

This strategy is what we are seeing now in Mexico with the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) criticizing the way the administration of Felipe Calderon, who belongs to the National Action Party (PAN), has prosecuted its war against the Mexican cartels.

I think Mr Yglesias' proposal that the Fed target a 3-4% rate of inflation is indeed the single best thing Washington can do to create jobs today.

there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "job creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment".

Philosophical questions of self-ownership and the alienability of labour aside, I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else.

Specifically, the two are discussing the situation in Bahrain, where the Saudis are backing a Sunni monarchy against a Shiite majority population that is considered a potential proxy of the Iranians.

The Saudis hope to reach an understanding that can contain the increasingly assertive Iranians, while Iran hopes that it can advance its position by forcing Saudi Arabia to accept it as a major stakeholder in the region’s security

One regular offender is the cyclobutane pyrimidine dimer. It's a bulbous ring attached to the elegant double helix of the DNA strand. It latches on to the damaged parts of DNA and is replicated along with them, causing widespread damage. Once it gets started, it can grow until it takes over the system.

Photolyase floats around the body, looking for encroachment from the dark side. This enzyme powers itself up using blue light, and then shoots out an electron.

the conscious mind often seeks to rationalize what emerges from the unconscious.

Not only do we run alien subroutines [i.e., unconscious processes]; we also justify them. We have ways of retrospectively telling stories about our actions as though the actions were always our [i.e., our conscious mind's] idea.... We are constantly fabricating and telling stories about the alien processes running under the hood.

The chicken/shovel experiment led Gazzinga and LeDoux to conclude that the left hemisphere acts as an "interpreter," watching the actions and behaviors of the body and assigning a coherent narrative to these events.

Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich will visit Sochi, Russia, on Aug. 11 for a meeting with Russian President Dmitri Medvedev. The main topic on the agenda will be the ongoing natural gas pricing negotiations between Kiev and Moscow, which have been a cause of bilateral tensions in the past.

The Ukrainian president is under increasing domestic pressure as a result of the trial and arrest of opposition leader and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko for an alleged abuse of power during her time in office.

For all China’s economic might, it’s worth remembering that it remains a) quite poor in per-capita terms and b) governed by an opaque, corrupt, oligarchic, anti-democratic single party apparatus that, for all the  dazzle of its economic accomplishments in recent decades, continues to immiserate large swathes of its population through internal migration controls, currency manipulation and, you know, large-scale denial of basic human rights.

I think it’s a bit too easy to let the U.S. off the hook, both in terms of the economics and the politics.

There really is a serious infrastructure problem in the United States, though, and not all of it can be explained by the fact that our infrastructure is old. Part of it can, to be sure. One of the advantages of developing late and/or having your entire continent reduced to rubble after the initial round of industrialization has run its course is that you’re allowed/forced to build new stuff rather than trying to upgrade/repurpose old stuff.

When the Tunisian leadership began to fall, we were surprised at the speed with which similar unrest spread to Egypt. Once in Egypt, however, it quickly became apparent that what we were seeing was not simply a spontaneous uprising of democracy-minded youth (though there was certainly an element of that), but rather a move by the military to exploit the protests to remove Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, whose succession plans were causing rifts within the establishment and opening up opportunities for groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

We are entering a very dynamic quarter. The Persian Gulf region is the center of gravity, and the center of a rising regional power competition. A war in or with Israel is a major wild card that could destabilize the area further. Amid this, the United States continues to seek ways to disengage while not leaving the region significantly unbalanced. Off to the side is China, more intensely focused on domestic instability and facing rising economic pressures from high oil prices and inflation. Russia, perhaps, is in the best position this quarter, as Europe and Japan look for additional sources of energy, and Moscow can pack away some cash for later days.

Libya probably will remain in a protracted crisis through the next quarter.

In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning [3]" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president [4] (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts.

a subconscious negative response to the new information—and that response, in turn, guides the type of memories and associations formed in the conscious mind. "They retrieve thoughts that are consistent with their previous beliefs," says Taber, "and that will lead them to build an argument and challenge what they're hearing."

Most citizens would lose all interest in government if there were no issues they could grasp. In a perfect world, the largely clueless citizenry, including me, would feel as if we're part of the system while having no power to break anything important. The birther issue is sort of like letting your toddler have a toy steering wheel in his car seat. He feels as if he's doing something useful and you don't have to rely on him to keep you out of the ravine.

Rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah held a ceremony May 4 commemorating a unity peace deal that in theory is supposed to end a very bitter four-year divorce between the two factions.

Israel now has to spend a great deal of energy lobbying governments around the world to refuse dealing with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas, as long as Hamas refuses Israel’s right to exist.

Clearly, Pakistan is coming under a great deal of pressure to explain how authorities in the country were not aware that the world’s most wanted man was enjoying safe haven for years in a large facility in the heart of the country.

It is no secret that Pakistan’s army and foreign intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, actively cultivated a vast array of Islamist militants – both local and foreign, from the early 1980s until at least the events of Sept. 11, 2001 – as instruments of foreign policy.

Mr Gingrich only took questions submitted in advance.

In the place of a credible commitment to family values, Mr Gingrich throws social conservatives hunks of red meat about American exceptionalism and the theological underpinnings of limited government.

"Secularism", Mr Gingrich maintains, "describes a worldview in which you're randomly gathered protoplasm" temporarily inhabiting a soulless world where there is no reason not to visit evil or universal insurance coverage upon your fellow sacks of protoplasm.

Let’s begin by trying to explain what it was that Putin in particular created. What he recognized was the problem of the Soviet empire, the problem with the czarist empire, was that they totally controlled surrounding territories. As such, they benefited from them, but they were responsible for them as well, and so that wealth was transferred into them to maintain them, to sustain the regimes, and so on and so forth. Putin came up with a new structure in which he had limited desires from countries like Ukraine. These were irreducible, that is to say, they could not be part of NATO, could not have hostile forces there, they had to cooperate on a bunch of issues. But Russia was not responsible for their future, and it was really a brilliant maneuver because it gave them the benefit of the Russian empire, of the Soviet Union, without the responsibilities, without the drain on the Russian treasury.

And what he has created in Ukraine, in Kazakhstan, in Belarus, is sovereignty for these nations and yet alignment with Russia. And this has made Russia a very powerful player because its house is in order at the same time that, for example, as the European house is in massive disorder.

With the country at war and the economy in recession, our government leaders’ first thoughts have been of party advantage.

The crisis is having an uneven effect on EU member states because the eurozone locks countries with different levels of economic development into the same currency union.

Merely moving people and goods from point to point on the Iberian Peninsula has always posed formidable challenges for governments and traders.

The president ran his finger over a map showing how Romania's neighbors such as Bulgaria and Hungary were almost completely dependent on Russian natural gas, while Romania -- because of its own hydrocarbon reserves -- still has a significant measure of independence. In the 21st century, the president explained, Gazprom is more dangerous than the Russian army.

Thus, Moscow's strategy is about taking over countries from within. In this battle, it is precisely during the quiet periods, when an issue like Ukraine drifts off the front pages because of the Middle East, for example, that we should be worried.