We’ve already seen how American men are falling behind in college education and how the evaporation of industries geared toward male workers has left many men unemployed. But the problems aren’t limited to the United States. The UK’s Guardian compiled statistics that show how British men are struggling in a six other areas: prison sentencing, employment, education, homelessness, […]

Peter Berger is away on travel this week. Regular posting will resume later this month. 

Rumors of another massacre in northern Nigeria are filtering out of the country, and they don’t sound pretty. About 200 Boko Haram militants apparently laid siege to the town of Bama yesterday, attacked an army barracks and a prison, freed scores of prisoners and killed almost two dozen military personnel.In a separate but equally grisly […]

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is having second thoughts about recanting his country’s apology for crimes committed in World War Two. Abe recently suggested that Japan might not have been the aggressor during the war due to the fact that “invasion” is a subjective term. Fortunately, saner voices have prevailed in the Prime Minister’s office. […]

You probably didn’t know that yet another round of international climate negotiations was going on last week in Germany. Don’t feel bad, we were just as ignorant. Fortunately, you didn’t miss much: The conference in Bonn ended without any commitments.This is what we’ve come to expect, given the international community’s track record at these grand climate […]

Nearly all the votes are in from the southern Indian state Karnataka’s legislative assembly election over the weekend, and it looks like the Congress Party won big. Congress, the national ruling party, of Jawaharlal Nehru, of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and now of Rajiv’s son Rahul, took 121 seats, over the BJP’s 40, out of a […]

American city dwellers are flocking to the sidewalks for the fast, delicious food to be found in food trucks. Not surprisingly, city regulators and bureaucracies have been slow to catch up with these rolling kitchens, leading to all kinds of headaches for these small business owners.The problems in New York City are particularly bad. Food […]

It may be that, even as I am writing this very sentence, a mid-level State Department official named Gregory Hicks is testifying before a Senate Committee and, in effect, connecting former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (never mind the hapless Susan Rice) to a cover-up in the aftermath of the tragic events of September 11, […]

The WTO has just selected a new leader amid one of the gravest crises since its founding. The race had been narrowed to two candidates, Roberto Azevedo of Brazil and Herminio Blanco of Mexico. Both are widely respected figures from Latin Ameria, but much has been made of the fact that Blanco enjoyed the backing […]

A lot of politicians around the world would probably enjoy doing this: if a pollster is reporting that your popularity is sinking, you sic the prosecutors onto the pollsters.That’s just what Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been doing. Brandishing a new law designed to stain the reputation of NGOs by forcing them to register as agents […]