Yesterday we wrote about a bombing Saturday in Quetta, Pakistan that killed upwards of 80 people. While violence there threatens to become so routine that attacks like this get little response, public anger is rising. Reuters reports: [G]rieving relatives refused to bury their kin in a powerful rebuke to a government they say has repeatedly failed […]

Guess who’s green in the Emerald Isle? Northern Ireland has just discovered that it’s sitting on shale gas reserves estimated to be the equivalent of about 1.5 billion barrels of oil worth £80 billion. But Phil Flanagan, the energy spokesman for Sinn Féin, said the government is being manipulated by greedy energy companies. He voiced his […]

Delivering on one of President Obama’s State of the Union promises, the Department of Education recently unveiled the “College Scorecard,” which conveys information on average student debt, graduation rates and loan defaults at nearly 3,500 schools. Yes, much of the data is a few years old, and it doesn’t yet include graduates’ average starting salaries, […]

If you think you can balance a budget with huge tax increases alone, take a look at France: President François Hollande’s plan to avoid necessary spending cuts by soaking the rich isn’t panning out. Awaiting Hollande is a major showdown with Angela Merkel, the FT reports: The problem for Mr Hollande is that Brussels and Berlin may […]

Russian news headlines frequently walk the fine line between plausibility and The Onion. This week is no different: Russia is trying a dead man for fraud.Sergei Magnitsky, an auditor who exposed a $230 million tax fraud by Russian police and officials and was then thrown into prison, tortured, and killed nearly a year later, will now […]

“The jihadists are still in the environs,” a Malian Army commander told the NYT. “They are certainly around. There are small caches of them, in hiding, 40, 80 miles from here.”Despite France’s quick success in pushing jihadists away from the main cities and towns in Mali, the enemy has not disappeared. They are still there, […]

Every new idea has problems and online ed is no exception. But the New York Times seems inordinately eager to call the whole thing a waste of time. Yesterday’s editorial, “The Trouble With Online College,” is oddly dismissive of what is likely to be the biggest threat to traditional college patterns of instruction: the “hybrid” […]

The New York Times suggests this morning that the White House is taking another look at whether to arm the Syrian rebel groups. The trouble is, all the choices are uglier now than they were when the president overruled his top national security officials to block this kind of aid last year. The good guys […]

Here’s a deal we wouldn’t be in a hurry to take: A Chinese entrepreneur will pay the local environmental protection chief 200,000 yuan (about $32,000) to take a 20 minute swim in an extremely polluted river. Looking to highlight the sorry state of the environment in his province and the widespread practice of industrial dumping […]

President Obama has put his Keystone XL pipeline decision off as long as he could, but soon he’s going to have to choose between his most important trading partner and one of his biggest constituencies. The New York Times has the story: Canada, the United States’ most important trading partner and a close ally on Iran […]