From The Financial Times: “The US now has information that Pakistan, particularly the ISI, gave access to the Chinese military to the downed helicopter in Abbottabad,” said one person in intelligence circles, referring to the Pakistani spy agency. The Chinese engineers were allowed to survey the wreckage and take photographs of it, as well as […]

From the Associated Press we learn that a Denver judge has thrown out a school voucher program that would have let parents use vouchers to pay tuition in private schools.  For the ACLU and other critics, this was unconstitutional because some of the schools are, gasp, religious.  To use taxpayer money to support religious schools […]

Over at Pajamas Media, Michael J. Totten has a fascinating report about the state of the Muslim Brotherhood in post-Mubarak Egypt. The subject of the Brotherhood’s role in January’s regime-ending protests, as well as the demonstrations against the current government has long been controversial. Totten thinks the confusion may be due to ineptitude and incoherence […]

If you can’t convince people of the need for a global carbon treaty with documentaries and IPCC reports, why not try it with fiction? Rajendra Pachauri has already published Return to Almora, his steaming novel about a tin-hatted, serially sort-of-monogamous Hindu holy man/neuroscientist, but unaccountably this contribution to world literature remains bereft of an American […]

John McWhorter at The Root has an interesting piece on the recent flash mobs in Philadelphia. Rather than viewing the violence as a result of poor parenting or institutional racism, McWhorter sees the root of the problem as the relationship between Black communities and the police in the war on drugs: Cops trawling their neighborhoods […]

Dan Drezner has a post up that gives a pretty gloomy outlook on the global political and economic climate. He also links to the study (pdf) by the Center for Economic Policy Research that analyzes the link between economic austerity and social unrest. Budget cuts, conclude the authors of the study, lead directly to social […]

David Cameron has vowed to get tough with rioters, and the usual suspects complain. What about the rights of the looters, they ask.  What about the freedom to tweet #fire in a crowded theater?A legitimate democratic government fighting looters and rioters (as opposed to peaceful demonstrators) has the right to restore social order by all […]

The Republican straw poll in Ames is an excellent example of a story that serious people should ruthlessly ignore.  For Republican political operators and people trying to figure out which candidate to back in order to get a government job in 2013, perhaps Ames matters.But for most of us, following the Iowa straw poll is […]

In an interesting new piece in The Atlantic, Edward Tenner discusses the rapid increase in musical virtuosity over the past generation, to the point where bygone masters would have trouble simply gaining acceptance to Julliard today. There is a downside, however — the flowering of new talent has been accompanied by a contraction in job […]

Butcher Assad as history will probably name him has had a good first week of Ramadan.  Yes, scores and maybe hundreds of innocent Syrians died in the streets, the Assad dynasty is now cordially hated throughout the Sunni Arab world, violence at home is continuing, the diplomatic isolation of Syria deepens by the day, sanctions […]