Former President Nicolas Sarkozy has just been booted from the Constitutional Council of France—the most important constitutional body in the country—for campaign finance violations. After some deliberation, the Council upheld a ruling that Sarkozy overspent allowed limits in the 2012 elections, and that his UMP party therefore owes more than €500,000 to the government. Sarkozy […]

150 years ago on the Fourth of July, the Siege of Vicksburg ended in a glorious American victory, and the secessionists lost their last bastion on the Mississippi River. With the Army of Northern Virginia also being beaten back from the ridges and hilltops of Gettysburg, July 4, 1863, was the day when Dixie started […]

As everyone enjoys their 4th of July BBQs and fireworks, take a few minutes to check out this excellent Time magazine photo essay of figures from the Revolutionary War who lived into the age of photography. Some of them lived longer than 100 years.Journalist Joe Bauman gathered these amazing photographs and daguerreotypes: His collection, which […]

The worldwide rise in anti-Christian persecution is not often noted by the MSM, but that doesn’t make it any less deadly. This week two new stories of persecution hit the web. Christianity Today reports that Hindu extremists broke into a Christian prayer meeting in India and beat up the attendees with clubs and iron rods. The attackers accused the pastors of using […]

So it turns out the French are up to almost the same things as their friends in the UK’s GCHQ and the US’s NSA: the French government has its own top-secret cyber-snooping operation going, according to Le Monde. VM‘s French is a little rusty, so forgive us any clumsy wording in the following: The intelligence services are looking at […]

As part of our ongoing project to update and improve the core documents of American history, we re-present the opening sections of the Declaration of Independence as they ought to have been written, and indeed as it would have been written if the still primitive colonial political process had only been sophisticated enough to restrict […]

Pension managers have become fond of running to Wall Street looking for help managing their funds. But they don’t seem to be getting their money’s worth. A new study conducted by the Maryland Public Policy Institute and the Maryland Tax Education Foundation examined the performance of a number of public pension systems around the country […]

China’s shale gas reserves—the largest in the world—are nearly double the size of America’s, but the country isn’t even close to catching up to the US shale boom, as analysts say it will be woefully short of self-imposed drilling targets. It turns out that simply having the resource under territory you control isn’t enough to […]

Two high-profile Portugese ministers have resigned in protest of austerity measures enacted as part of 2011’s €78 billion bailout. Until recently, Portugal has managed to stay out of the headlines, meeting its creditors’ demands while navigating the kinds of public outcry over belt-tightening austerity measures that has thrown Greece, Italy, and Spain for a loop […]

Reports of the its imminent demise notwithstanding, the immigration bill passed by the Senate last week has higher education administrators ecstatic. Under the terms of the bill, foreign-born students who earn PhDs at American schools would be eligible for green cards, and those who earn master’s or PhDs in STEM fields at schools outside the […]