Good news from Pakistan is dishearteningly scarce these days, but from time to time one sees evidence that more and more of Pakistan’s opinion makers realize that the contest with India is literally tearing Pakistan to pieces and that liquidating the competition is more important than anything Pakistan can hope to gain by continuing it.One […]

The stoner lobby would like us all to believe that Legalization Day is just around the corner and the momentum for an end to the war on drugs is irresistibly rising.It ain’t, and this AP story (h/t NY Times) helps explain why.  The FDA has been slow to tighten controls over one of the most […]

Economist Michael A. Clemens states something that ought to be well known but for some reason isn’t:  that restrictions on the free movement of labor are more costly than any other existing limits on freedom.  That doesn’t mean there’s much to be done anytime soon.  You can download the whole text of the article here, […]

Whether it is generic religious bigotry, alarm at the success of Christian missionaries at making converts, or simple xenophobia, Tehran has been cracking down on its tiny Christian minority of late, so much so that even the EU has noticed.Yusef Nadarkhani, an evangelical pastor and the father of two, has been sentenced to death for […]

It’s been a bad month in Russia.  The stock market, already one of the cheapest in the world by conventional valuation, is down 20 percent. A teenager and her stepfather were killed and eaten by bears as the girl called her mother on her cell phone to describe the attack.  Two swimmers off Russia’s Far […]

The stereotype, held apparently by none other than the President of the United States, is that religious people are less educated and less affluent than cosmopolitan and sophisticated seculars.  The bitter clingers handle snakes, guns and Bibles in West Virginia; the seculars discuss literature and economics at swank parties in Georgetown.In fact, some recent research […]

Readers puzzled and intrigued by the battle erupting over corruption in India should read White Tiger, the Man Booker award winning novel by Aravind Adiga to get some sense of why this issue is so explosive. Corruption in a kind of shorthand for political, social and economic privileges that are deeply woven into India’s social […]

Ann Althouse picks up one of the oddest reports of the week: the Hungarian government wants to discourage students from taking English as their first foreign language because it is so easy!  The original article in The Wall Street Journal is a head-scratcher: Hungary’s government wants to dethrone English as the most common foreign language […]

The financial crisis is clearly much worse than the public has been told.  The London Daily Telegraph reports that Goldman Sachs, shaken by the brutal economic environment, has ordered thousands of dollars of potted plants removed from its London offices as an economy measure.  Staff were reportedly so horrified that they physically tried to stop […]

US Department of Labor figures on state unemployment brought more gloomy news to the White House.  Among the ten states where unemployment rose significantly in July were the key battleground states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and New Hampshire.  The employment picture was significantly improved in only two battleground states: Colorado and New Mexico.