Eat your heart out, labor activists! Venezuela raises the minimum wage by 30 percent.

Japanese nationalists, including racist fringe groups and supporters of historical revisionism, are gaining ground.

Here are several links for your reading pleasure.

Americans still think our health care system is a mess, and they want the government to fix it. The debate over health care is just getting started.

Many of the world’s coastal megacities are sinking into our oceans. In some cases, they are subsiding faster than sea levels are rising—and humans, of course, are at fault.

France is following in Germany’s footsteps by shutting down nuclear reactors and spurring renewable energy production. That plan has been a spectacular failure in Germany, and it won’t work in France either.

A new piece in the NYT argues that women are outperforming men from an early age. This new “boy crisis” is a natural result of telling boys they have nothing special to offer.

U.S.-Saudi relations have been hovering barely above the sand in recent months, and Riyadh is showing an increasing willingness to pursue its regional goals without Washington’s oversight. The attendance of a Pakistani General to yesterday’s massive Saudi military parade suggests a closer relationship between the two regional powers. Iran will not be pleased.

The World Health Organization reports on the alarming prevalence of drug-resistant bacteria around the world. Bacteria that lurk in hospitals are a particular threat, including one strain that causes pneumonia and blood infections.

Jonathan Chait’s takedown of a hilariously biased anti-charter school piece of “reporting” at the NYT shows us that the blue civil war is alive and well when it comes to education.