An Jung-geun is a national hero in South Korea. In 1909, at the dawn of Japan’s 35-year brutal colonial rule over the Korean peninsula, he killed former Japanese Prime Minister and then-Resident General of Korea Ito Hirobumi at Harbin Train Station in Heilongjiang province, China. He later wrote out 15 reasons why Ito Hirobumi deserved death, including […]

Britain’s National Health Service has had a pretty dismal track record lately. Earlier this year, we learned of truly abhorrent conditions at one UK hospital, followed quickly by another report revealing that a number of hospitals have been systematically covering up abuses. Now we hear that a fifth of all NHS employees have been the victim of bullying by […]

Several high ranking Muslim Brotherhood officials have resigned from the Egyptian government on the heels of yesterday’s army-issued ultimatum, culminating most recently in the Foreign Minister reportedly stepping down. Morsi himself has remained defiant, but his ability to stay in control looks shakier by the minute.How will this all end? With fast-changing situations like this, […]

Forty thousand San Franciscans accustomed to using the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) were left scrambling today as 2,300-plus BART workers are on strike. Labor contracts for these employees expired at midnight without a new deal in place, as the city and labor unions couldn’t agree on pay, pension contributions, and medical costs. The Mercury […]

Teachers in Tennessee will be granted fewer automatic salary increases, a move that education association head Gera Summerford says will strike at the very heart of the school system.Teachers were originally entitled to 21 minimum pay levels (increasing from their first to their twentieth year of teaching), across five levels of education (from bachelor’s to doctorate). […]

The people who, in the words of the Chinese Communist Global Times newspaper, “burned and destroyed vehicles, and wielded knives, madly slashing and killing police and innocent members of the public” in Xinjiang last week received training in Syria. In all, 35 people were killed in those attacks. Reports out of Xinjiang are unreliable, especially […]

New York state isn’t exactly rolling in money, but some of its politicians are. Several county lawmakers have been fudging their time cards in order to collect pensions, according to an investigation. Ordinarily, officials are required to work a full thirty hours every week in order to receive benefits such as pensions and health care, […]

From the very beginning of the so-called revolution in Egypt, I have taken some pains to throw a wet mop in the face of all those clueless Western commentators who believed that democracy, as we understand it, let alone liberal democracy, was at hand in Egypt—or anywhere else in the Arab world save maybe Tunisia. […]

Florida Governor Rick Scott has signed a bill to expand the use of massively open online courseware in the state’s primary, secondary, and higher education systems. The law, which has been described as a slightly watered down version of an earlier bill, encourages public schools to use the courses as a teaching tool in certain […]

The Europeans are none too happy with President Obama. The German news magazine Der Spiegel broke news on Saturday that the NSA had bugged EU offices in Washington and New York, as well as a number of national embassies. The New York Times: According to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. installed listening devices in European Union diplomatic offices […]