For once, some good news from the British National Health Service: physiotherapists and podiatrists will now be allowed to prescribe medication for their patients without doctor supervision. BBC: Care and Support Minister Norman Lamb said the move would not only benefit patients by making it more convenient to get treatment, but would also free up […]

At many schools across the country, playing Cops and Robbers is now a punishable offense. On the basis of zero tolerance policies for firearms and other weapons, teachers and administrators are going to war against imaginative games involving fake violence. As War Against Boys author Christina Hoff Sommers points out, this is not only absurd but also […]

Detroit’s public pensions aren’t taking bankruptcy lying down. Concerned that the city’s bankruptcy filing could lead to serious cutbacks, two funds are challenging the filing in court, charging that Governor Rick Snyder is violating the constitutional requirement that the state protect public pensions. In addition, the funds allege that the city has failed to prove […]

A top advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin came out forcefully against Ukraine’s  cozying up to the EU on Sunday, saying that it would be “suicidal” for the former Soviet state. This comes on the heels of Putin’s opening salvo in a potential trade war with  Ukraine last week, when Russia began discriminatory and costly […]

At the foot of Mount Fuji on Tuesday, Japan’s military held annual exercises with dozens of aircraft, 80 tanks, and 2,400 troops, the AP reports. Designed more as a spectacle than a training opportunity, the exercises focus on a scenario in which Japan is attacked from the sea. As a narrator explained the attack to […]

Is seven years old too early to start teaching computer science? Vietnam doesn’t think so.Google software engineer Neil Fraser visited a school in Vietnam where computer science classes begin in the second grade and continue right up to graduation. By fourth grade, students were already writing programs using loops, and by “grade 5 they are […]

There’s a fight going on in the tiny village of Balcombe that could have large implications for Britain’s energy security. The village has just a couple thousand residents, but it’s what lies underground that is causing the controversy. Cuadrilla, an oil and gas exploration firm, is drilling a well there to determine if the region’s […]

When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled a proposal to reform his country’s state-owned and grossly mismanaged oil and gas monopoly Pemex last week, he was careful to reassure the public that “all hydrocarbons will remain the property of the Mexican people.” Peña Nieto promised to open up Mexico’s oil and gas reserves to foreign companies via […]

A group of Japanese nationalists who belong to a group called Ganbare Nippon (“Stand Firm, Japan”) has returned to port after sailing around the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The five ships were surrounded by Japanese coast guard ships and urged to leave the area. NBC News reports: Members of the…group did not […]

The colossal scope of student debt in America is no longer a secret, but the federal government has yet to take its proper share of the blame for the crisis. In an excellent piece at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi homes in on how government lending practices have inflated the bubble, and documents many abuses of federal […]