News Logging

Recessions can raise death rates. How governments should handle health-care budgets during a downturn.

Recessions can raise death rates. How governments should handle health-care budgets during a downturn.

When you hear the brutal details about Zimbabwe, it's hard to imagine how it can get any worse without the government collapsing, or Robert Mugabe resigning. The hyperinflation, the millions going hungry, the canceled anti-AIDS programs, the 3 million (out of a total 11 million) who have fled the country. Then you go there, as I did in June, and the most striking thing is the normalcy amid all that hardship. There's the group of nine high-school graduates meeting with the American ambassador before they head to the United States for college; at night they hide from marauding enforcers looking for opposition voters. Young men with clubs chant as they trot along a road after dark, looking for victims, but a white woman pushing a child in a stroller crosses just in front of them, unmolested. Mugabe is an Anglophile, and so are many Zimbabweans. Everyone's talking about the forthcoming elections—which Mugabe was clearly going to steal (and did)—and the vanishing or murdered opposition politicians, but they also crowd around TVs to watch Britain's Andy Murray advance to the semifinals at Wimbledon, and debate loudly whether he's too obnoxious to deserve victory.

When you hear the brutal details about Zimbabwe, it's hard to imagine how it can get any worse without the government collapsing, or Robert Mugabe resigning. The hyperinflation, the millions going hungry, the canceled anti-AIDS programs, the 3 million (out of a total 11 million) who have fled the country. Then you go there, as I did in June, and the most striking thing is the normalcy amid all that hardship. There's the group of nine high-school graduates meeting with the American ambassador before they head to the United States for college; at night they hide from marauding enforcers looking for opposition voters. Young men with clubs chant as they trot along a road after dark, looking for victims, but a white woman pushing a child in a stroller crosses just in front of them, unmolested. Mugabe is an Anglophile, and so are many Zimbabweans. Everyone's talking about the forthcoming elections—which Mugabe was clearly going to steal (and did)—and the vanishing or murdered opposition politicians, but they also crowd around TVs to watch Britain's Andy Murray advance to the semifinals at Wimbledon, and debate loudly whether he's too obnoxious to deserve victory.

President Obama is the greatest example of immigrant success that one could find anywhere, and that's a tribute to America.

President Obama is the greatest example of immigrant success that one could find anywhere, and that's a tribute to America.

Mexican tycoon

Mexican tycoon

He's the most influential radical Shiite leader in an unsettled Arab world.

He's the most influential radical Shiite leader in an unsettled Arab world.