The weekend brought another spate of violent attacks in Nigeria. In the city of Jos, three died outside the Church of Christ headquarters at the hands of a suicide car bomber, which Boko Haram later claimed as their own.Located on the border between the Muslim north and Christian south, Jos has long been a flashpoint […]

As the saying goes, those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. But in the education bureaucracy, those who can’t teach, teach teaching.  And those who can’t teach teaching, evaluate.The New York Times informs us of the struggles, bordering on the absurd, that Tennessee is experiencing as it attempts to conform to the diktats […]

The past few years have seen public pension systems dip into red all over the country. The problem is perhaps at its grandest in California, where the Sacramento Business Journal is now reporting that not a single local pension system has adequate funding.California’s public pensions have universally failed to achieve the standard funding level of 80 percent or higher—many […]

We reported yesterday on the tragic byproduct of foolish subsidies for Argentina’s state rail system. Now it seems President Kirchner’s government is locked in a fight with YPF, a Spanish-owned energy company that controls about 60 percent of Argentina’s energy market.The dispute began when YPF sought to raise local prices. The government balked, and so […]

How do you turn an annual salary of $25,000 into a fortune worth more than $250 million?Become the governor of a Nigerian state.The BBC reports that James Ibori, a former governor of the oil-producing state of Delta, pleaded guilty in a UK court to ten counts of money-laundering and conspiracy to defraud.Ibori spent his ill-gotten […]

When last we checked in with the chief of the ankle-biters, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was claiming Jesus had told him he was cured of cancer (thus foiling a nefarious Western plot). Something malignant appears to have resurfaced, according to the Washington Post, and cancer experts (who haven’t had access to this patient) say this is […]

The FT is reporting on a new study that casts doubt on some of the core assumptions of the green movement: that we currently live in the best of all possible climates, and that any departure from that ideal state due to global warming is necessarily a bad thing: But it also forecasts several benefits of global warming, […]

The UK and Germany are divided on many things, but on one they are agreed: both Chancellor Merkel and Prime Minister Cameron are hoping that French President Nicolas Sarkozy defeats his socialist rival Francois Hollande in the upcoming French presidential election.Merkel has offered to make campaign appearances for her EU partner; now comes word that […]

Two weeks after the ruling of the Spanish Supreme Court that convicted Baltasar Garzón and led to his disbarment as a magistrate, the media is close to unanimous in portraying the case as a Francoist assault on the democratic institutions in Spain and the revenge of malicious peers, envious of Garzón’s international standing.   In […]

More trouble is brewing around Tehran’s nuclear initiative. Reuters reports: Iran is still relying on old technology to expand its nuclear program, in what may be a sign it is having difficulties developing modern machines that could speed up production of potential bomb material. . . .“It appears that they are still struggling with the […]