A judge has lifted former International Monetary Fund Seducer-in-Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s house arrest, releasing him on his own recognizance while retaining his passport until the end of proceedings. While the charges against Strauss-Kahn for allegedly sexually assaulting a New York hotel maid in May still stand, it remains to be seen how long that will be the case.The shift came when the M

TEL AVIV ― The old vocation of what Rudyard Kipling called the “White Man’s Burden” ― the driving idea behind the West’s quest for global hegemony from the days of imperial expansion in the nineteenth century to the current, pathetically inconclusive, Libyan intervention ― has clearly run out of steam. Politically and economically exhausted, and attentive to electorates clamoring for a shift of pr

All dressed up in riot gear and nowhere to go. Such was the plight of two dozen Thai police officers stewing in boredom Sunday night near one of Bangkok’s busier nightlife districts. Thai elections tend to be anarchic affairs for the keepers of order, with protests often deteriorating into violence. This time was different; tear gas canisters sat unused after the victory of allies of Thaksin Shina

MUNICH ― “It’s not the euro that’s in danger, but the public finances of individual European countries.” One hears this everywhere nowadays, but it’s not true. The euro itself is at risk, because the countries in crisis have, in recent years, been running the eurozone’s monetary printing presses overtime.Some 90 percent of the refinancing debt that the commercial banks of the GIPS countries (Greec

BERKELEY ― Back in the late 1990s, in America at least, two schools of thought pushed for more financial deregulation ― that is, for repealing the legal separation of investment banking from commercial banking, relaxing banks’ capital requirements, and encouraging more aggressive creation and use of derivatives. If deregulation looks like such a bad idea now, why didn’t it then?The first school of

Is there any greater nuclear threat to the world than North Korea? With a dozen nuclear weapons and a vile record of proliferation, this rogue state and its lunatic leader can be relied upon for just one thing: making terrible trouble for its neighbors and everyone else.Just last month, U.S. Navy warships intercepted a North Korean vessel carrying missiles to Myanmar (Burma) and turned it around.S

Understanding how pornography affects the brain and wreaks havoc on male virility permits people to make betterinformed choices.NEW YORK ― It is hard to ignore how many highly visible men in recent years (indeed, months) have behaved in sexually self-destructive ways. Some powerful men have long been sexually voracious; unlike today, though, they were far more discreet and generally used much bett