Russia has long struggled with Islamic (and other) terrorists in the Caucasus. President Vladimir Putin promised to eradicate terror networks and separatists movements as he rose to power in 1999 and 2000, and ever since then he’s been ruthless in targeting enemies of the state. The days of hostage crises and apartment block bombings are gone, […]

“Organized labor is in free fall,” writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times. He’s right. As Porter puts it, The number of workers who belong to a union has plummeted about 20 percent over the last decade. Only 8 percent of all workers are unionized. And leading labor activists are wringing their hands over […]

The Great Recession has done something that seemed unimaginable just a few years ago: it has dented America’s faith in the returns on higher education. Over the past four years, the number of adults who see college as a “good investment” dropped by a quarter. The Huffington Post reports: In 2008, 81 percent of adults […]

We already knew that the Iranian leadership hates the Talmud, denies the Holocaust, funds genocidal terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, murders Israelis and Jews abroad, and generally seems ill-disposed to the very existence of the State of Israel. Now a Reuters exclusive report based on hitherto unseen documents brings the whole picture into focus: […]

At a time when the country is obsessed with the idea that all comity is lost and bipartisanship is dead, education writer Ben Joravsky makes a point that we’ve tried to get at on this blog: there are some important domestic issues where the parties have much in common.Joravsky doesn’t like the bipartisan education consensus, […]

Is Kim Jong Un the next Den Xiaoping? An unnamed source informs Reuters that the young Supreme Leader of North Korea has carried out a purge against army officers loyal to his father’s economic planning, exclusively controlled by the military. Now Kim the younger has set up a new independent political bureau to take over: […]

Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok highlights a fascinating exchange between super-VC Peter Thiel (AI interview here) and Google’s Eric Schmidt on the future of technology. Do read Tabarrok’s excerpts, and don’t neglect to read the whole thing over at CNN. (In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably say here that I sit on the […]

With 77 percent approval ratings, things could hardly be better for Brazilian President Dilma Roussef, but those numbers may be about to take a dive. The Wall Street Journal reports that early next month the Supreme Court will hear a major corruption case against members of Roussef’s Workers’ Party that is expected to dominate headlines for weeks.If […]

At a time when American higher education is facing perhaps the gravest crisis in its history, it seems like every passing week brings a new idea or new advance in technology with the potential to change things for the better. Via Meadia has extensively discussed the rise of online education and distance learning. Now the New York Times is featuring […]

For most states in these times, the biggest problem is finding the money to spend on essential services. But in California, the state can’t even spend money once it finds it.The Wall Street Journal reports that, despite the $700 million dollars allocated by Sacramento to upgrade mass transit systems in the Bay Area, people probably won’t […]