If all you read is up-to-the-minute coverage of what’s been going on in Egypt over the past three days, you might be forgiven for assuming that what the Egyptian Army is doing somehow defies the wishes and desires of most Egyptians. With the caveat that the plural of anecdotes is not data, an article in […]

Whether it’s a matter of simple missed deadlines or deliberate executive secrecy, crucial data on federal health care experiments is being withheld from the public.Last month the Obama administration released data on the first-year performance of the Affordable Care Act’s primary cost-saving measure: accountable care organizations. The results were mixed, even worrying. But at least the […]

Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan—and even Iran. All are feeling the effects of the civil war in Syria. Let’s take a look at what’s happened the past few days.At least 34 people were killed in as many as eight car bomb attacks in Iraq yesterday. Hundreds were wounded. One bomb exploded just a few yards from the […]

Obama’s signature education initiative, the Common Core curriculum, may be in serious trouble. The New York Times reports that the Tea Party and a number of left-leaning parents have become unlikely allies in the fight against the rollout of the initiative, although they oppose it for slightly different reasons. For the Tea Party, the Common […]

Philadelphia’s public school system is scraping the bottom of the barrel just to keep going. Only weeks before the beginning of the school year, the city has been forced to borrow $50 million to open the schools on schedule, and many critical programs will be put on hold. Worse, this comes after Philadelphia closed about a tenth […]

Latest news from Venezuela: marauding thugs are running around the country cutting women’s hair at gunpoint in order to resell it to salons for use in hair extensions and wigs. Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro is having none of it: Mr Maduro used strong language against what he called “mafias that cut girls’ hair”.Speaking at the […]

To mark the anniversary of Japan’s defeat in World War II, and in retaliation for visits by several Japanese ministers to the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo yesterday, China’s navy carried out live-fire naval exercises in the East China Sea today. Separately, China’s aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, embarked on a ten-day training voyage in the Bohai Sea […]

When Obamacare’s exchanges go live this fall, uninsured Americans will have the choice of either purchasing coverage on an exchange or paying a penalty. We’ve known that the penalty was less than the cost of insurance, but as far as we know there hasn’t really been a systematic attempt to quantify the difference (just how […]

Ukrainian firms are squealing that Russia is initiating what amounts to a trade war by putting in place discriminatory and costly border procedures that are delaying Ukrainian goods from reaching their destinations in Russia. Russian leaders have taken care to deny any outright responsibility, seeming to indicate that this is a bureaucratic matter to be […]

German Chancellor Angela Merkel made some comments in a radio interview on Tuesday that have been turning heads in Europe. While noting that the EU needs to work hard to become more competitive, Merkel stated that it would be possible to do this with “less Europe” and that Brussels could “give something back” to national […]