As you’ve no doubt read by now, Hugo Chavez finally succumbed to his tumors yesterday. Pravda certainly carried the most amusing title for its obituary: “Chavez loses his battle, Heaven gains an angel”. But the best, most well-rounded assessment of the man’s life and legacy in our view came from The Economist, whose conclusion largely gybes […]

Many have been keen to report that the rich aren’t actually spurning California for other, lower-tax states. The flight of the wealthy, they’re happy to announce, is just a myth.Unfortunately, they’re missing the other half of the picture. The problem with California’s severe taxes and byzantine regulations is not just that they make life unpleasant […]

As reported by Religion News Service and other media, on February 19, 2013, Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada appointed Andrew Bennett to be Ambassador for Religious Freedom. Bennett, a Catholic with a doctorate in political science from Edinburgh and dean of a small college in Ottawa, is to head a new Office on Religious […]

Eight former DEA chiefs want President Obama to keep a lid on pot. In a joint statement released on Tuesday, they urged Obama to have his administration sue Colorado and Washington over their new marijuana legalization laws: One of the former DEA administrators, Peter Bensinger, told the AP that the more time goes by, the […]

The war in Syria just strayed into Iraq.Forty-eight Syrian soldiers were killed yesterday inside Iraq, in a well-coordinated ambush by gunmen whose identities remain unknown. Numerous reports say the soldiers were unarmed and many of them were wounded. They apparently crossed into Iraq near Yaarubiyeh to escape heavy fighting in northern Syria and were being […]

Student debt soared to nearly $1 trillion at the end of 2012, but young Americans now have the lowest levels of total debt that they have had for 15 years, according to the WSJ: A typical young U.S. household—defined as one led by someone under age 35—had $15,000 in total debt in 2010, down from […]

WRM has an op-ed in the WSJ on how al-Qaeda remains a serious threat to the US even after its failures in Iraq and the death of bin Laden: At this stage, the terrain favors America’s enemies. In places like the wide swath of Africa’s Sahel region, and in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, it is […]

Decades of incompetence and corruption in Detroit have led the city to the brink of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history—yet the private sector is booming. Some might attribute this discrepancy to poor management on the part of the city government, but a recent piece in the NYT takes a different approach, bemoaning the plight of […]

Over at the New York Times, Erik Olsen reports on a new visual amplification process with lots of applications, including checking premature babies’ pulses without touching them: A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that […]

Catching up on some stuff I don’t want to slip by:The most important news of the past few days is arguably contained in a somewhat-buried article in the New York Times by Robert F. Worth and C.J. Chiver, entitled “Seized Chinese Weapons Raise Concerns on Iran.”  The subtitle gives a hint of one of the […]