No city has embraced the school choice movement more than New Orleans. Yet over the past few weeks, the Wall Street Journal has been taking a close look at how the idea is working out, and the results have been decidedly mixed.The biggest problem is that there simply aren’t enough high-quality schools to go around. The […]

Say you’ve just finished building a house out of straw, but after stepping back to admire your work, you realize it’s listing dangerously to one side, ready to collapse. Do you look at the materials you used and acknowledge that maybe you’ve made a mistake? Not if you’re China. No, if you’re China, your solution […]

A wave of car bombs planted in predominately Shia Muslim neighborhoods throughout Baghdad killed at least 47 people today and injured dozens more. The BBC has the bloody details: Monday’s blasts struck during Baghdad’s morning rush hour, with reports of 13 bombs, most of them in Shia neighbourhoods.Groups of labourers gathering ahead of the working […]

A devastating attack on a historic marketplace in Peshawar caps a particularly deadly week for Pakistan, even by its own standards. After a double suicide bombing at a Christian church killed 83 people last Sunday, a bus bombing killed 21 government officials on Friday, and yesterday at least 40 people were killed as a bomb […]

Textiles, the cutting edge industry of the 19th century, are making a surprising comeback in the 21st-century US. The New York Times profiles the unexpected economic twist, noting that manufacturers are becoming more concerned with safety and quality workmanship than with rock-bottom wages—two areas where America enjoys an advantage over countries like China.The industry, however, still […]

Another day, another dreary episode in Washington’s shutdown/debt limit soap opera, reports CNN: In a move that makes a shutdown appear very likely, House Republicans approved a spending plan early Sunday morning that would delay Obamacare for a year and repeal its tax on medical devices.The temporary budget resolution now goes back to the Senate, where Democrats […]

The media fawned over the Kellogg-Briand Pact, too, you know.

It is being called one of the most significant moves since Deng Xiaoping created the Shenzhen special economic zone in 1980s: on Friday, China unveiled its plans for a Shanghai free trade zone. A small sub-section of the metropolis, 28 square kilometers, has been marked off as an area where restrictions on foreign investment will […]

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro decided to skip New York and forfeit his speaking slot at the United Nations last Wednesday because of unspecified threats to his personal safety. The Beeb: “When I got into Vancouver I evaluated the intelligence which we received from several sources.“I decided then and there to continue back to Caracas and […]

China dominated news out of Asia this week. It’s experiencing a perverse consequence of its one child policy: a sharp uptick in adoptions of “designer babies” from the United States. China’s demography has a more problematic effect on the horizon, as the country sees a pension disaster looming in its near future. But it’s the country’s polluted […]