Oslo— The Oslo Freedom Forum is an annual event sponsored by the New York–based Human Rights Foundation, which brings together dissidents and journalists from all over the world to show that people of good will can promote basic freedoms without an overlay of ideology. Censorship, both official and self-imposed, is an important theme [Continue]

Facing bleak prospects — decades of crushing national debt and an increasingly intrusive government — many commentators lament the loss of our individualism. They see in the election of 2012 one last chance to make a stand for slowing down the encroachment of the state on aspects of life once considered the preserve of the [Continue]

Ismail Belghar, a 36-year-old Muslim man living in Australia, assaulted, abducted, and nearly killed his sister-in-law. The victim, a 25-year-old Moroccan named Canan Kokden, had dared to take her older sister, Mrs. B, to the beach without Belghar’s permission. This heinous effrontery was amplified, Belghar later recounted for police, when [Continue]

America forgets its heroes at a dispiritingly rapid rate. Barely does a statue go up in, say, Manhattan’s Bryant Park or Farragut Square in Washington, D.C., before passersby have to stop to read the plaque to figure out whom they’re looking at. Soon after, no one stops to read at all. The whole history of [Continue]

Now that President Obama has “evolved” on the matter of same-sex marriage to the position favored by “enlightened” Americans, this would seem to be a good time for some rhetorical hygiene. There are modest and civil proponents of same-sex marriage. But the tone of many advocates has been shrill to the point of frothing. The [Continue]

American interests and allies in the Persian Gulf are threatened. What’s needed is a clear and tough statement right from the top, so the president starts making speeches. What does he say? That depends on whether it’s Jimmy Carter in 1980 or Barack Obama in 2012. Jimmy Carter in 1980 was a lot tougher. Keep [Continue]

In Quebec, the students are revolting. This is both surprising and utterly predictable: surprising because college students in French Canada have by far the best financial deal in the country and should thus be the last people to complain, predictable because the Québécois have a long history of being difficult and demonstrate [Continue]

To the long list of right-wing, knuckle-dragging know-nothings who dare question so-called “global warming,” environmentalists now can add six Apollo astronauts, two rocket men who flew aboard Skylab, and a pair of former directors of the Johnson Space Center (JSC). These veterans of America’s space program are among the 49 [Continue]

President Barack Obama insists that he didn’t announce his support for gay marriage out of political considerations. He’s right. He did it out of self-regard. How it must have eaten away at him to be the first African-American president, yet not associate himself with what has been deemed the foremost civil-rights issue of the age. [Continue]

While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney’s prep-school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it [Continue]