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 […]

Fearing huge losses at the next election, Israel’s largest opposition party, Kadima, has removed Tzipi Livni as its leader. Livni was foreign minister in the previous government and is one of Israel’s strongest advocates for peace with the Palestinians. Her replacement, Shaul Mofaz, is a former army chief-of-staff and ex-defense minister.The FT‘s political post-mortem on Livni’s […]

No surprises here: A new Gallup poll reports that Americans are still broadly skeptical of the Green agenda, currently putting economic growth ahead of the environment by 49 percent to 41 percent. And moderates are increasingly joining conservatives in the opinion that economic growth should be a priority even if it incurs some environmental damage.Gallup polls […]

Britain’s Channel 4 News aired a segment earlier this week that shows Syrian activists faking some parts of videos they broadcast on YouTube. In one instance, activists record themselves asking the international community for help, with black smoke swirling in the background; the activists had set the fire themselves before turning on the video camera.We […]

The situation in the West Bank is deteriorating, according to the Washington Post. In addition to a budget deficit that now tops $1 billion and a decline in the foreign aid that the area relies on, the Palestinian Authority is facing political pressures: “Most of the money is spent on security, and the security is […]