“A British-born Muslim militant admitted Thursday to kidnapping Wall Street Journal correspondent Daniel Pearl and said he believed the journalist is dead,” The Washington Post reports. “Officials dismissed the militant’s claim, and the Journal said it remained confident Pearl is alive.” ‘As far as I understand, he’s dead,’ Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh said in a courthouse in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi, where Pearl disappeared on Jan. 23 while

Richard Bennett offers these great observations (over the course of several posts) by way of entry into the blogosphere porn wars: Radical feminist Diana Russell has tried to connect porn with rape by doing retrospective studies of rapists, claiming that they nearly all have big porn collections, but she’s never published this stuff in a reputable journal. Part of the problem is that retrospective studies almost always confirm the researcher’s

Capitalism Magazine’s Walter Williams writes that diversity is doublespeak for ideological confirmity: Diversity is simply the old racism in a new guise, spiced up with a touch of sexism. Diversity is a call for race-conscious decisions in hiring, promotion and college admittance policy. Diversity management success is measured by the numbers: How many minorities or women are employed, promoted or enrolled? Wrong numbers invite the wrath of the state. At

“Orchestras might be forced by European law to play music more quietly, according to a leading British musicians body. “The Association of British Orchestras (ABO) is fighting to be exempted from a European directive under consideration that would place limits on noise in the workplace,” the BBC reports. The directive has already been agreed by Britain and other EU member states and will receive a second reading in parliament later