Just a few short months after Hugo Chávez declared himself “cured” (again) of cancer just in time for October elections, the man has yet again emerged from a successful surgery. BBC News reports that Chávez’ operation, his fourth since 2011, lasted about six hours.But instead of claiming that Jesus had cured him or that the reemergence of the cancer was inflicted […]

The Chinese army must “intensify its ‘real combat’ awareness” the state-run Global Times newspaper quotes Xi Jinping as saying. He made the comments last week on a tour of the army’s theater of operations in southern Guangdong province, which borders the South China Sea. During the same trip China’s new president also urged his citizens to prepare […]

In 2009, Europe announced a new program to finance the installation of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technology in industrial plants, which would allow these plants to capture their own emissions and store them underground rather than releasing them into the atmosphere. The funding for the installations was expected to come from the sale of […]

Monday saw the election of Mauritania to the position of vice president of the UN Human Rights Council. That’s the same Mauritania, mind you, with almost a million of its own people in chattel slavery. We’re sure that the council’s president-elect, Poland, is looking forward to working with its honorable new partner.The worst part of […]

Labor’s clout is in steep decline in the Middle West. In a move that was unimaginable just ten years ago, Michigan Governor Rick Snyder signed a pair of “right-to-work” bills into law, dealing a serious blow to unions in one of the states that gave birth to the modern labor movement in America. The Wall […]

It’s official. Like the Clinton and Bush administrations before it, the Obama administration has no clue how to deal with North Korea. The DPRK just launched a long-range rocket into space that may or may not have put a satellite in orbit: The US described the act as a “highly provocative act that threatens regional […]

Recent estimates put the size of India’s underground economy at somewhere between 25 to 50 percent of GDP. This designation covers a wide variety of industries, but the main culprit is land sales. BBC News takes a look at just how bad the situation has become: India’s property sector is possibly the worst offender. Barun Mitra, the founder and director […]

The National Intelligence Council dropped a bombshell in its latest forecast, Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds, predicting that America will lose its status as the world’s sole superpower by 2030. Predictably, the mainstream press had read this report as an endorsement of American decline, and headlines have announced it in somber tones as further evidence […]

How bad is California’s public employee compensation problem? If nurses collecting $1 million in overtime pay and highway patrol officers making $500,000 are any indication, “bad” doesn’t cover the half of it. From Bloomberg (the first in a five-part series): In California, Governor Jerry Brown hasn’t curbed overtime expenses that lead the 12 largest states […]

Don’t let the Swedish sexism police catch you giving trucks to little boys for Christmas. Sweden’s fearless regulators are taking on toy companies for assuming that boys like cars and Nerf guns while girls prefer dolls and tea sets. The Atlantic has the story: The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys”R”Us and […]