Egypt’s new constitution is widely expected to pass in a referendum today. The measure enjoys unanimous support from the media, and opponents have been forbidden from campaigning on its behalf for fear of arrest. The military is still on top.

We’re used to thinking about sex-selective abortion as a third world phenomenon, but a new study finds that the barbarous practice has reached England’s shores. An investigation by The Independent into birth data for immigrant populations in England and finds good evidence that sex-selective abortions are practiced more widely than many realize. But sex-selective abortions are illegal in England, while a bill to ban them in the United States failed.

Officials from both Japan and China, including the Japanese prime minister, visited Africa recently. Is Africa becoming the latest battleground for east Asian diplomatic and economic competition?

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s ambitious school voucher programs just got a big boost from one of the biggest names in education reform. Students First, a school reform organization led by former DC schools commissioner Michelle Rhee, released a national state-by-state report card on Tuesday which ranked Louisiana first in the nation with a B- grade, just ahead of Florida, Indiana and Rhode Island.

Viewing religion in an unbroken continuum with every variant of magic is a perspective grounded in a widely diffused class of people—part of the culture of an international intelligentsia.

A few weeks ago, Iraqi Kurdistan began piping oil north to its border with Turkey, connecting Iraqi oil fields with Turkey’s fairly extensive pipeline network for the first time. That didn’t go over well in Baghdad, where officials are worried that the region’s oil exports to Turkey will make it more economically and politically independent from the central Iraqi government. Irbil has done little to quell those fears, announcing that it will sell its first blocks of oil through its own regional oil marketing association, rather than the Iraqi state equivalent.

The evidence is mounting that the vicious torture and murder of Christians in the Central African Republic may have had backing from government in Chad. The CAR isn’t the only place in Africa where religious violence occurs almost daily. Today, the Nigerian army blamed the jihadist group Boko Haram for bombing a market place in Maiduguri. The MSM would rather not talk about the God Wars in Africa, but this continues to emerge as the biggest story south of the Sahara.

The commentariat is busy poring over the latest enrollment numbers for clues on Obamacare’s future, but on Capitol Hill, the verdict is already in. A poll of Hill staffers found that the vast majority are seriously concerned about their health plans under Obamacare—so concerned, in fact, that many of them may be driven to seek new jobs. As The Hill reports, of the 38 percent of staffers who are planning to get a new job next year, more than two-thirds cited health care costs as a major reason.

The first months of 2014 aren’t shaping up to give Obamacare any better publicity than the last months of 2013. At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff highlights one issue that she says is likely to make Americans “furious” even if it will also lower costs: narrow networks.This is what happens when you try to control costs by tinkering with insurance plans and coverage requirements—or even rate setting. Instead of imposing network changes on people who don’t want them, we should be thinking about how to change the structure of care delivery such that basic services are cheaper and health care is more convenient for everyone.

Iran’s foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, is visiting Lebanon this week, and he had some contradictory announcements to make. First, Zarif paid his respects and laid a wreath at the tomb of his fallen comrade Imad Mughniyeh in Beirut. Mughniyeh was a senior Hezbollah commander who was killed in 2008 by a car bomb of unknown origin. He is deemed responsible for orchestrating the 1983 bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Lebanon that killed hundreds of Americans. Zarif then met with Hassan Nasrallah, the chief of Hezbollah, and several other Lebanese government officials before giving a press conference. At the press conference, he announced Iran’s commitment to “combatting terrorism,” which is a “dangerous phenomenon” that requires “international cooperation.”