USA Today reports that large numbers of American high school students favor curtailing press freedoms. Only 51% of students surveyed, for instance, believed the media should be able to print its stories without censorship; 36% believe the government should approve stories before they run. A third of...

Sumit Ganguly, a brilliant expert on India and international relations, writes this piece in The New Republic online about India’s role in the post-tsunami humanitarian aid missions. Like China, India is taking a major role in the efforts to deal with the crisis; both countries, though technically...

Evolution News & Views (www.evolutionnews.org) is a new blog hosted by the Discovery Institute, which examines how issues surrounding evolution are addressed in the mainstream media. It is pro-alternatives-to-evolution, and seems very reasonable in its approach (as opposed to the strident or condescending...

Germany to unemployed German women: Take a job as a prostitute, or lose your unemployment benefits. Yes, really: Under Germany’s welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry –...

I wanted to take a moment to highlight some of the entities that help keep In the Agora ticking. Michael Meckler, a respected journalist and historian, has created an insighful new blog that offers daily column on politics, religion, arts and current events. Check it out at Red-State.com. Meckler’s...

Catching up on some back issues of Vanity Fair and ran across the “Proust Questionnaire,” a quick twenty plus question quiz for celebrities. December’s man in the ring was author Louis Auchincloss. I haven’t read any of his stuff, but obviously he’s a hitter in the publishing...

Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez is a rock star to the fifteen thousand socialists and Leftists gathered in the alternative world economic forum being held at Porto Alegre, Brazil, this week. The AP describes the affection which the ‘activists’ have for Chavez: “American Mike Fox, of...

Egad! A9, the Amazon.Com search engine, has released a Yellow Pages service that features photographs of the buildings that match a given street address. It is increasingly wrong to worry about the government collecting data on you, and hoarding it in the NSA’s archives; it is more likely that...

Josh asked me to comment on a Bill Gates speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Gates takes as his thesis that China’s low wages, intelligent leadership, low medical and legal overhead, and huge surplus labor pool has resulted in a new form of capitalism. If past is prologue, Gates’s...

If there is one thing that Lew Rockwell can’t stand is that some foreigner somewhere might be enjoying freedom. On this historic day in Iraq, all that arrogant think-tanker can do is rant against neocons and by the looks of it he’s having a hissy fit. The Rockwellians have never met a dictator...