As expected, there was much more barking than biting at the BRICS summit in New Delhi this week. A BRICS-backed bank was among the new institutions the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) said they hoped to create, but different interests and priorities among countries with few things in common blocked any […]

Glenn Reynolds, the redoubtable blogger behind Instapundit, interviewed Prof. Mead on Pajamas Media TV this week. Topics of discussion include President Obama’s first term and higher education.Here’s the video. 

According to Iran, there are good revolutions and there are bad revolutions. Tehran supported the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and Yemen last year, but on Thursday Iran’s highest authority, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, reiterated his longstanding support for the Assad regime, saying his country is “strongly opposed” to any foreign intervention in Syria.The Ayatollah’s opposition made […]

As Arab leaders sip tea and discuss what to do about Syria in the heavily guarded (yet still vulnerable) compounds of Baghdad, one thing is clear: No one cares about Arab nationalism anymore.The leaders of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain and Oman refused to attend the summit. The predominately Sunni Arab countries […]

The noose around the neck of the Iranian economy is getting tighter. Two more countries, Turkey and India, are preparing to cut their imports from Iran. Turkey appears set to cut imports by 10 to 20 percent, while India may cut imports by as much as 25 percent. As the second and fifth biggest importers of […]

Santa Monica College is trying something new: a two-tiered pricing system separating its most popular courses from all the others. The community college is charging a premium for classes with the highest demand, pricing them at $180 per credit hour rather than the usual $36, the New York Times reports.Predictably, this has a number of […]

As President Obama moves the U.S. toward a pullout from Afghanistan by 2014, it’s time to start asking the question: What will Afghanistan look like when America leaves? Events in the remote region of Baluchistan in western Pakistan may give us a clue.In this impoverished and sparsely populated region, a bloody and poorly understood insurgency […]

We’ve known for some time that the Google geeks were working on cars that could drive themselves. Lasers, cameras and radar work together in Google’s system to, well, drive a car with no human help. According to Google, it’s working: This week, Google celebrates 200,000 miles of computer-led, accident-free driving. (Reports that a self-driven car […]

The big-box school model that has dominated educational systems is looking shakier by the day. In America, parents fed up with poor results in public schools are taking more control over their children’s education: To look at just one metric, there were 1.5 million children homeschooled in America last year, 75 percent more than eight years […]

Apparently, the people who know Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez best and work with him most closely think he’s a liar. That’s the only possible reason why, despite Chavez’s frequent and continuing claims that his cancer (type and status still held as a secret) has miraculously been cured, his entourage is erupting in a mad scramble […]