Hundreds of thousands of trainees are active in the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, according to a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Many of those recruits are intelligent, secularly educated, driven young men, say the authors of the report, throwing cold water on the common assertion that most young men who join […]

Americans are flocking to “cram schools”, math test prep schools once primarily led and attended by Asian and Russian immigrants. The NYT reports: It’s no surprise to the average New York parent that so-called cram schools, once the cultural domain of Chinese-, Korean- and Russian-American students, have gained traction with non-Asian parents hoping to grab slots […]

It’s been a truly abysmal week for New York politics. Earlier this week, Democratic State Senator Malcolm Smith was accused of trying to rig the city’s mayoral election by bribing his way onto the GOP ballot. Now two New York State Assemblymen are being charged in another bribery racket to keep a Bronx senior center […]

Germans have a favorable impression of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s management of the Cyrpus crisis, according to a poll cited by the Washington Post, but the really important data is buried lower in the story. The same survey found that “75 percent of respondents believed the worst of the euro crisis is still to come.”European political leaders have […]

Drug kingpin Naw Kham was accustomed to a comfortable life on the lam in the “Golden Triangle”—the remote mountains and river valleys where Burma, Thailand, and Laos meet. He had a small army to protect his meth and heroin business and a network of locals and politicians who would tip him off if the authorities were […]

Thinking of taking out a big loan to pay for college? Before you do, take a look at these numbers on student loan debt from the Guardian. They paint a pretty depressing picture of post-college life.The most notable number is, of course, the total level of student debt in the US, which is now just over […]

The heat is on for traditional hospitals and doctors’ offices. Walgreens just became the first chain store to offer diagnosis and treatment services for chronic conditions like asthma and diabetes. Kaiser Health News reports: Walgreens officials say they will have nurse practitioners and physician assistants at more than 300 Take Care Clinics in 18 states and […]

The jobs numbers are out for March, and they’re a doozy: only 88,000 new jobs were added, with unemployment inching down to 7.6 percent. That may not sound so bad until you look at the context. This figure is significantly down from the 268,000 jobs added in February, and is far more dire than the […]

If you want an indicator of how confused green policy is in Europe, look no further than the fact that EU policy treats burning wood as an energy source of the future. This madness stems from the EU’s attempt to derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020; burning wood—or biomass, as […]