The American winner of the Prix Goncourt, Jonathan Littell, has added another feather to his cap. His novel, The Kindly Ones, was tonight announced as the winner of the Literary Review's 2009 bad sex in fiction award.
The Kindly' [...]
President Barack Obama has little interest in, understanding of or affection for free markets, so he fails to understand that the fundamental relationship between government and the economy is that of parasite to host.
Some functions of government are absolutely essential to a free economy. We [...]
President Obama has offered Pakistan an expanded strategic partnership, including additional military and economic cooperation, while warning with unusual bluntness that its use of insurgent groups to pursue policy goals "cannot continue."
The offer, including an effort to help reduce tensions between [...]
The "health-care reform" bills in Congress would hit 39 states hard with new expenses, by raising Medicaid eligibility above the cur rent income cutoffs.
The only states that won't have to raise eligibility because of the Senate bill are Connecticut, Illinois,' [...]
Medicare fraud is a multibillion-dollar business preying on an ever-increasing number of retiring baby boomers who often are being charged for medical treatments and products they don't need and for services they don't receive.
The health care reform legislation pending in Congress -- and under [...]
Television news reports projected that Mr. [...]
Russian authorities suspect a former Russian soldier of being behind Friday's train derailment which killed at least 25 people and injured around 100. According to news reports yesterday, the Russian security services have marked Pavel Kosolapov, a Russian soldier turned Islamic militant, as one of the top [...]
Iran has reorganized its naval forces to give operational control of the strategic Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz to the naval component of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the paramilitary organization that is playing an increasingly central role not only in Iran's military [...]
An ancient giant river that was created when a huge glacial lake in the North Sea overflowed was responsible for first dividing Britain from France.
The 'Fleuve Manche' or 'super-river' ran south from the area of the North Sea.
At different times in history the river ebbed [...]
Britain is at serious risk of losing its way in Afghanistan because rising defeatism at home is demoralising the troops on the front line, military commanders have warned.
High-ranking officers, including a former commander of the SAS, have expressed deep concern that the country is in danger [...]
SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.
It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a [...]
Yemen's handling of former Guantanamo detainees and accused extremists in its own jails has raised fears that sending detainees back to this nation, the poorest in the Arab world, might only create more militants determined to attack America.
Disputes over the fates [...]
We reported in this space on Nov. 22 that Associate Attorney General Thomas J. Perrelli, the third-ranking official in the Justice Department, had recused himself from at least 39 cases (13 of them active) involving terrorism-related detainees. We editorialized then that it [...]
Here’s my take: Major Hasan may have been mentally unbalanced — I assume anyone who shoots up innocent people is. But the more you read about his [...]
A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more [...]
Researchers analyzed data on thousands of people who provided information about their mental well-being and found that the increase in happiness from [...]
A Washington Times reporter and photographer spent much of October - the deadliest month for American troops there thus far - with U.S. Army soldiers [...]
For the slum-dwellers of El Junquito, the fabulous views of Caracas have never been of much interest. It was the piped water and electricity supplied to their makeshift homes that earned their loyalty to Venezuela's authoritarian leader, President Hugo Chavez.
But 10 years [...]
British troops will begin handing over control of Helmand province to Afghan forces by the end of next year, Gordon Brown claimed yesterday as he set out plans for a withdrawal from Afghanistan after years of bloody fighting and the deaths of 235 British soldiers.
[...]HELICOPTERS used by British special forces to mentor their Afghan counterparts on anti-drugs operations have been grounded to save just £2m a year. The funding for the helicopters — used by the Special Boat Service (SBS) and Afghan special forces for raids on drugs barons and [...]
Russia was tonight coming to terms with its most deadly terrorist attack in years after investigators confirmed that a powerful improvised bomb caused Friday's devastating train crash in which at least 26 people, including several top government officials, were killed.
The head of Russia's FSB counter-terrorism agency, [...]
Just another day in Afghanistan? More like the dress rehearsal for war, played out on 100,000 acres of snake-infested [...]
The U-turn by the university follows a week of controversy after the emergence of hundreds of leaked emails, "stolen" by hackers and published online, triggered claims that the academics had massaged statistics.
In a statement welcomed by climate change sceptics, the university said [...]
This has been a year of soul-searching for Republicans, and with the party eager to rebuild, its Senate campaign chief finds himself in a pinch.
Texas Sen. John Cornyn sees opportunities in numerous states Barack Obama won last year and – despite [...]
Can this marriage be saved? The union of junk scientists, on the prowl for government handouts to pay for their computer games, and eager politicians sniffing an enormous new source of tax revenue was a match made in a dark alley. The always gullible mainstream [...]
Instead, there is a soft, warm welcome for the dozens of young men and women reporting to Officer Candidates School at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia.
Arriving in polos and khakis, they check in [...]
She stands precisely 5ft tall in her everyday shoes and her smile is disarmingly sweet.
Kate Nesbitt doesn't immediately fit the image of fearless military hero, not off the battlefield at least.
But there are probably few people a critically injured soldier would rather meet in' [...]
Counter-terrorism police and Whitehall officials believe dozens of extremists could have arrived here by posing as students or legitimate visitors.
They are concerned both by the relatively lax checks that are made on the visitors before they arrive and by the ease with which [...]
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expressed "great regret" in August that the U.S. is not a signatory to the International Criminal Court (ICC). This has fueled speculation that the Obama administration may reverse another Bush policy and sign up for what could lead to the trial [...]
W ith good reason, the prevailing economic concern of most Americans is jobs.
With this in mind, two Democratic congressmen have cooked up a plan to help us out. The strategy entails sucking another $150 billion of capital investment out of the market each year and [...]
Recent studies by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime show a steep [...]
So declares Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, taking a few minutes away from a Thanksgiving retreat with his family. "Ninety-five percent of the nails were in the coffin prior to this week. Now they are all in."
If any politician might be qualified to offer last [...]
After engineering an unprecedented spending surge for nearly a year, President Barack Obama now wants to signal that he takes deficits seriously. So this week the White House announced that it is considering creating a commission to figure how to fix the budget mess.
Eureka!
Well, [...]
While President Obama and congressional leaders say they would like to do more to spur job creation, economists and business executives warn that their plans to impose new health care and climate-change costs on corporations would have the opposite effect.
The initiatives, according to this [...]
Gordon Brown will embrace the central thrust of General Stanley McChrystal's report into the future of Afghanistan when he speaks today of the need to develop a military and political "push".
Days before Barack Obama spells out US strategy in Afghanistan, the prime minister will outline [...]
Poor nursing care, filthy wards and lack of leadership at Basildon and Thurrock University NHS Hospitals FoundationTrust led to the deaths of up to 400 patients a year.
Figures compiled by a health watchdog showed death rates at the Essex trust were a third [...]
The New Zealand Government’s chief climate advisory unit NIWA is under fire for allegedly massaging raw climate data to show a global warming trend that wasn’t there.
The scandal breaks as fears grow worldwide that corruption of climate science is not confined [...]
New Geography, the online magazine created by Joel Kotkin and others with a special focus on demographics and trends, has been tracking the implosion of California in an interesting way: by comparing it to Texas.
Texas and California are America’s two most populous states, together [...]
Why the pessimism? In short, we are doing nothing to prepare for the crises to come.
A global recession has led to low oil prices. Yet in this window of opportunity, America has not decreased its foreign-oil dependence. We are not encouraging domestic [...]
Two weeks before President Obama visited China, two senior White House officials traveled to Beijing on a "special mission" to try to persuade China to pressure Iran to give up its alleged nuclear weapons program.
If Beijing did not help the [...]
The controversy surrounding the global warming scandal today deepened after a BBC correspondent admitted he was sent the leaked emails more than a month before they were made public.
Paul Hudson, weather presenter and climate change expert, claims the documents allegedly sent between some of the world's' [...]
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian President, received a hero’s welcome yesterday as he visited his key Latin American ally on a regional tour designed to shore up support for Tehran in its confrontation with Western powers.
Shouting “Viva Ahmadinejad!” Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez pledged his [...]
As the world awaits the highly anticipated announcement of the President’s Afghan War strategy, the Taliban is actively trying to influence the debate in Washington through a sophisticated information campaign. Emphasizing the intractability of the conflict, the Taliban seek to dissuade the White House from investing [...]
The nation is divided over what to do next: Nearly half of those surveyed endorse deploying thousands of additional [...]
US intelligence officials are concerned that Syria is becoming an al Qaeda haven, as the terror group becomes increasingly intertwined with Ba’athist groups operating from Iraq's neighbor to the west.
Al Qaeda has refocused its efforts to build an infrastructure in eastern Syria after its network in [...]
In the geological past, there have been six major ice ages. During five of these six ice ages, the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was higher than at present. It is clear that the colorless, odorless, non-poisonous gas called carbon dioxide did not drive past climates. Carbon [...]
A Hezbollah political official and his son-in-law sought this year to smuggle 1,200 machine guns from the United States to the militant Islamist group via Syria, according to indictments made public Tuesday against 10 men in federal court in Philadelphia.
Hassan Hodroj and Dib [...]
In early October, I covered a breaking story about evidence of corruption in the basic temperature records maintained by key scientific advocates of the theory of man-made global warming. Global warming "skeptics" had unearthed evidence that scientists at the Hadley Climatic Research Unit at Britain's' [...]
It's not true that the only good terrorist is a dead terrorist. Even dead terrorists aren't good. But at least they're dead.
And that helps.
But political correctness has possessed Washington. It's so bad that even Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who's done a [...]
If you experience impotence, instead of a little blue pill maybe you want to apply shockwaves to your privates instead.
Experiments now suggest directing shockwaves at penises can help treat erectile dysfunction.
"We can really reverse erectile problems with this," [...]
Just 38% of voters now favor the health care plan proposed by President Obama and congressional Democrats. That’s the lowest level of support measured for the plan in nearly two dozen tracking polls conducted since June.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey [...]
The indirect talks involve officials from Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Britain, and top Afghan Taliban [...]
Fort Worth businessman Tom Schieffer is expected to drop out of the Texas governor's race later today, and Houston Mayor Bill White then will join the fray, according to a reliable source.
We now have a second reliable source telling us that White's switch to [...]
SIXTY-FIVE years ago, in November 1944, the war in Europe was at a stalemate. A resurgent Wehrmacht had halted the Allied armies along Germany’s borders after its headlong retreat across northern France following D-Day. From Holland to France, the front was static — yet thousands of [...]
Kevin Williams:The greatest error in the current conventional wisdom is that, [...]
The Fort Hood killings were no isolated incident, but part of al Qaeda's "third wave."
The 9/11 terrorists were the first wave: Their attacks culminated years of direct attacks on America and the West by al Qaeda operators -- a core group of Saudi, [...]
For those of us who have tracked Islamic militancy in Europe, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's actions are not extraordinary. Since Muslim militants first tried to blow a French high-speed train off its rails in 1995, European intelligence and internal-security services have increasingly monitored European Muslim [...]
"Green energy" is proving to be no miracle solution to the nation's monumental unemployment problems, and it is doing little to help the economy emerge from its deepest recession in decades, economists say.
A large part of the $786 billion stimulus bill was devoted to [...]