Iraqis turned out across the country to vote in provincial elections over the weekend. Unfortunately, barely half of the country’s eligible voters went to the polls, much lower than the 72 percent who voted in 2009.“It’s show business. The Iraqi people are sick of it,” a 27-year old doctor from Baghdad told a Wall Street […]

A Reuters reporter’s recent visit to Jhang, in Pakistan’s Punjab region, should be a reality check for any Westerner tempted to celebrate Pakistan’s upcoming elections—the first ever transfer of power from one civilian administration to another—as a victory for democracy.In most countries the leader of a sectarian group blamed for horrendous suicide bombings and assassinations of […]

A harrowing scene occurred recently on the New York City subway when a group of teens approached and harassed a Jewish man wearing a yarmulke. The ringleader, a self-identified Muslim teen, threatened to kill the man and added, “They should have killed all of you.” When police confronted the belligerent 17-year-old at a stop in Brooklyn, a […]

If you’re at all a technophile, you’ve heard about the self-driving cars that Google is developing. But you may still be wondering how long you’ll have to wait to drive ride in one. The answer: probably not as long as you think.Industry experts quoted by the Wall Street Journal predict that fully autonomous cars will be able to […]

The US Department of Education has approved financial aid for College for America, an online program that Southern New Hampshire University calls “the first degree program to completely decouple from the credit hour.”Marc Parry at the Chronicle Of Higher Education Wired Campus Blog reports (h/t Tyler Cowen): Unlike the typical experience in which students advance […]

For much of the past 60 years, the United States and China have been at odds over issues like the status of Taiwan and the nightmare that is North Korea. More recently, the pivot to Asia has added China’s various maritime territorial claims to this sometimes fraught relationship. By and large, all of these are […]

Congratulations on making it to Earth Day 2013! This is quite an achievement, given that the greens of the 1970s predicted we would all be living in a post-apocalyptic world of environmental despoliation, à la Soylent Green—that is, if we were living at all.Washington Policy Center once collected some of the choicest predictions from the decade […]

A 153-page report released today by Human Rights Watch makes for pretty distressing reading for anyone following the story of Burma’s emergence as an “open” and “free” democratic country. The report describes in detail the massacre of Rohingya Muslims by mostly Buddhist Arakanese, and blames the Burmese police and political leadership for allowing, even encouraging, the slaughter […]

Spring is here, a time when Japan’s nationalist politicians traditionally pay their respects to Japan’s war dead by visiting the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo. These visits always provoke a furor in the region, and this year things are no different. Among the shrine’s memorialized are more than a thousand war criminals who were executed after Japan’s […]

Fancy stadiums often appeal to politicians: they are prestige projects, they offer lots of publicity, promising jobs for their friends and associates, and they make construction unions very very happy. But publicly assisted stadium building is the mark of a city that has lost its way. The only development wheeze that is worse is casinos.The New […]