An American Bar Association task force on law schools is suggesting several major changes to a legal education, among them: reducing the length of programs from three years to two, shifting the focus of legal education towards the practice of law rather than theory, and, perhaps most interesting, providing training for lower-level legal assistants along the lines of […]

Once again President Obama has found the sour spot in his foreign policy—this time on Syria. Already pilloried by the left and right for his garbled strategy, Obama is now drawing the ire of the center as well. Following Leon Panetta’s admission last week that the President overruled his national security team’s wish to arm […]

Germany’s Environment Minister told a radio show Monday that he “can’t see fracking being used anywhere in Germany in the foreseeable future.” The Associated Press brings us the story via Fox News: Environment Minister Peter Altmaier told Deutschlandfunk radio Monday that Germany’s government is working to ensure the practice is subject to limits and he wouldn’t advise […]

American universities may finally be catching up to Iran on LGBT rights. Our foe to the east offers state-funded sexual reassignment surgeries. Now Brown University’s student health insurance plan will also be picking up the tab for 14 different gender-shifting surgeries starting in August. The Brown Daily Herald reports: “We identified this as an important benefit for […]

The big news this morning is that Pope Benedict XVI says that he will resign by the end of February, the first pope to do so in just under 600 years. Read the official statement, courtesy of ABC News. The key passage: After having repeatedly examined my conscience before God, I have come to the […]

The next financial market meltdown may already be brewing: not in the housing market, this time, but in municipal bonds. Greedy bankers, opportunistic politicians and hobbled regulators are putting a time bomb in the muni market that could set off another devastating crash.California is leading the way.It is starting out innocently enough. Looking to expand […]

This week we responded to Matt Yglesias’ eye-opening experiences with government red tape. The liberal columnist encountered the darker side of the blue model when he attempted to file for a single basic business license. This got us thinking again about the failures of Liberalism 4.0: Heavy regulation plus bad governance hurts the poor and prevents jobs from being […]

A US non-profit warned the UK more than four years ago that many British hospitals were doing a terrible job caring for patients, according to a report released in the aftermath of the Stafford Hospital scandal. The Telegraph reports the UK’s Department of Health asked the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, then run by Obama’s former healthcare […]

Car use is falling in Auckland, New Zealand, and city planners around the world should start paying attention: New Geography thinks this could be a sign of things to come: The prospect of falling car use now needs to be firmly factored into planning for western cities.That may come as a bit of a surprise in light […]

Every year, Foreign Policy and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto award the Lionel Gelber Prize for the year’s best foreign affairs book, and this year I’m one of the judges. They’ve just released the long list of titles in the running, which we’ve listed below with a link to their […]