President Obama wants to be rid of the Global War on Terror, but the Global War on Terror isn’t quite finished with him. For evidence, turn your gaze to Niger, the large, sparsely populated country on the southern edge of the Saharan desert.“A car bomb exploded at about 5.30am local time at an army base […]

Last night’s vote by the Boy Scouts of America to admit openly gay youth has at least one of the telling signs of a true compromise: everyone is unhappy with it. Despite the fact that both the Roman Catholics and Mormons threw their weight behind the measure, some religious families are upset and are threatening to […]

It’s a battle of the titans as fracking squares off against beer in Germany. The Reinheitsgebot, Germany’s beer purity law that’s been on the books for almost five hundred years, could kill the country’s hopes at extracting its shale resources. Der Spiegel reports on German brewers’ resistance to fracking for fear that it might contaminate the water used […]

The Syrian Civil War is looking every day more and more like the Civil War in Spain. Just as fascists, communists, and anarchists from all over Europe streamed into Spain, so Sunnis and Shiites are flocking to Syria.Sam Dagher reports for the Wall Street Journal: Shiite fighters, primarily from Lebanon, Iran and Iraq, are now […]

After forty-plus years of absence, ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) is returning to the City University of New York. A very ugly exit in March of 1971, forced by immature, ill informed, and generally appalling student protests, kept the military segregated from CUNY, one of the most diverse universities in America, for entire generations.A moving […]

The NYC city council has just passed a resolution allowing religious groups to worship in public schools, taking a stand on a decades-old controversy. Since 1994, state legislators and activists with a radical interpretation of the First Amendment have been trying to evict New York City churches from public schools. The official New York City […]

After months of bitter debate, Chicago’s Board of Education voted to close 49 underused and underfunded public schools—the largest school closure America has seen in decades. The New York Times reports: Chicago now has 145,000 fewer school-age children than it had more than a decade ago, according to district data, and the district had already […]

Just two days after the President of the Philippines announced a $1.8 billion naval expansion, mostly to combat Chinese “bullying”, Japan pledged its help. “Japan will provide patrol boats to the Philippines to help the country bolster its capabilities in the face of China’s growing presence in regional waters,” reports the Asahi Shimbun. “In a meeting […]

College isn’t for everyone, and there’s data to prove it. During the 2011-12 academic year, the number of students enrolled in American colleges and universities dropped by 1.6 percent, while the number of degrees awarded increased by 5.1 percent, according to a new study. As colleges attract fewer marginal students who wouldn’t have succeeded in attaining a degree, […]

The gutsiest, highest risk economic drive for growth in the world these days is coming out of Japan. After decades of stagnation, accompanied by deficit spending and Keynesian stimulus on an enormous scale, the world’s third largest economy is crashing its currency to stimulate exports and doing everything nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe can think […]