Novelist Salman Rushdie, famously, is something of an expert witness on the menace of blasphemy laws. On February 14, 1989, recall, Iran’s fanatical ruler Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa suborning the murder of Rushdie, a foreign citizen, for the crime of writing a work of fiction, The Satanic Verses. Agents of militant Islam from London to Lahore […]

A year ago, the world was abuzz with talk of the euro crisis and the feared disintegration of the European Union. By the end of 2012, the discussion has shifted to the crisis of the liberal democracy model itself. The debate is no longer “Keynes vs. Hayek” or expansionary vs. austerity fiscal measures. At the […]

One of the world’s leading credit-rating agencies agrees with us that higher-ed has a serious revenue problem. Moody’s recently released a statement saying that it has given a negative grade to the entire higher-ed industry, citing “diminished prospects for revenue growth.”As the New York Times notes, the recession has put a damper on the effectiveness of […]

New York City is spending a fortune on school buses. The New York Times reports that the city spends an astonishing $7,000 per student each year to bus children to school, nearly twice as much as other large cities.It doesn’t take too much digging to see why NYC busing is so expensive: A complicated system of rules regulates the length of […]

We’ve heard about the war against homelessness, but the hidden tragedy of second homelessness is something new. A new report from Smart Growth America, an anti-sprawl coalition, finds that federal housing policy subsidizes vacation homes at taxpayer expense. Through the federal Mortgage Interest Deduction, tens of billions of dollars ever year go toward second homes for wealthier […]

The Algerian hostage crisis continues to unfold in dramatic fashion: Reuters and other news agencies are reporting that dozens of hostages were able to escape their captors, while an as yet undetermined number were killed, when the Algerian military launched a rescue operation at a remote natural gas facility deep in the desert. A number […]

Well isn’t this a new twist on the American dream: The BBC reports that a creative American software developer outsourced his own job to China. Yes, you read that right. An employee paid a Chinese firm one-fifth of his hefty salary to do his job while he browsed cat videos on the web.His ploy was apparently discovered […]

As the furore that erupted across India over the gang rape of a 23-year-old student in Delhi continues to simmer a month after the horrific incident, some people, including Prem Shankar Jha, a seasoned journalist and one of the sharpest commentators on Indian affairs anywhere, noticed that something very interesting is going on: Indians are losing faith in […]

Here‘s what happens when people start losing faith in paper money: A German populace, worried by a potential break-up of the euro, started asking increasingly wild questions about the gold holdings. The issue was then supercharged by a report by the federal Court of Auditors that criticised the Bundesbank for having insufficient access to the […]

After every mass shooting, the talk of the nation turns to gun control, and the particular horror of the Newtown tragedy has made the conversation louder than ever.New York lawmakers passed the strictest gun laws in the country on Tuesday, and yesterday President Obama released a set of executive orders that marked the strongest action […]