Iran's threats to close the vital Strait of Hormuz, its naval exercises in nearby waters, and the ominous increase in tensions over its nuclear weapons program all point to a dangerous year ahead.

Slow and steady increases in the retirement age and minor tweaks in benefit formulas can no longer stave off disaster: Reformers must now entertain policy solutions once considered unimaginable. And prominent among those solutions is subjecting Social Security and Medicare to some form of means-testing, by which poorer seniors would receive more generous benefits and the wealthy would receive less (or none at all).

Recent calls for tighter clinical requirements for medical devices should themselves be recalled. Such requirements would not greatly increase public safety; they would hamper innovation.

The Federal Reserve has recently announced its intention to purchase an additional $600 billion of securities as part of a second round of quantitative easing.

If the polls are reliable, it seems that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez will be tested on September 26. For the defenders of Venezuelan democracy, the test will come the morning after.

Washington cannot allow Pyongyang to continue to create a rift in the U.S.-Japanese alliance.

Patients who take a close look at medical science in search of treatments are often appalled by what they discover. On the one hand, there's academic research, a self-contained and self-absorbed universe of its own where data may be internally consistent (on a good day) and robustly reproducible, yet often has little relevance to real-world clinical conditions.