Reports are emerging today of a horrific chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus. Reuters initially put the tally at “over 200” dead. An opposition group counted 494 dead. George Sabra, an opposition official, said 1,300 people had died. Images and videos of children and women and elderly and ordinary people, dead without visible […]

For Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, it’s Jews all the way down. The Gezi Park protests were apparently the fault of a shadowy “interest rate lobby”, and now he informs us that Israel was behind Egypt’s ouster of its Islamist president Mohammed Morsi: “What do they say in Egypt? Democracy is not the ballot box. What […]

The alarm bells are going off in Asia: China, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India are all facing negative economic news. And some are beginning to worry that we could be back to the conditions of the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “All this QE [quantitative easing] money has lead to a massive credit inflation bubble in Asia,” said […]

Pervez Musharraf, the former dictator of Pakistan who recently made a triumphant return to his country from exile only to be put under house arrest, has been charged with murdering former prime minister Benazir Bhutto today. Bhutto was killed in 2007, when a suicide bomber attacked a campaign rally only weeks after she returned to […]

When parents complain about the high cost of college tuition, college admissions officers often respond by pointing out that few students pay the full sticker price, due to scholarships and federal aid programs. According to the Department of Education, in the 2011-12 school year 57 percent of students relied on some form of federal aid, […]

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto isn’t the only one with a plan to reform Pemex, the country’s bloated, mismanaged oil and gas monopoly. His proposal, which involves reforms to the country’s constitution that would allow foreign firms access to Mexican hydrocarbons via profit-sharing agreements, will have the two-thirds majority it would need to pass the legislature […]

For once, some good news from the British National Health Service: physiotherapists and podiatrists will now be allowed to prescribe medication for their patients without doctor supervision. BBC: Care and Support Minister Norman Lamb said the move would not only benefit patients by making it more convenient to get treatment, but would also free up […]

At many schools across the country, playing Cops and Robbers is now a punishable offense. On the basis of zero tolerance policies for firearms and other weapons, teachers and administrators are going to war against imaginative games involving fake violence. As War Against Boys author Christina Hoff Sommers points out, this is not only absurd but also […]

Detroit’s public pensions aren’t taking bankruptcy lying down. Concerned that the city’s bankruptcy filing could lead to serious cutbacks, two funds are challenging the filing in court, charging that Governor Rick Snyder is violating the constitutional requirement that the state protect public pensions. In addition, the funds allege that the city has failed to prove […]

A top advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin came out forcefully against Ukraine’s  cozying up to the EU on Sunday, saying that it would be “suicidal” for the former Soviet state. This comes on the heels of Putin’s opening salvo in a potential trade war with  Ukraine last week, when Russia began discriminatory and costly […]