With the death toll of the latest jihadist attack in Nigeria now at 41, Christians in that country can draw little consolation from the government’s assurances that the attack could have been far worse. Boko Haram — Nigeria’s most violent jihadist organization — has already murdered over 1,000 people since the beginning of 2011, and there is little evidence that its terror campaign will end any time soon.

Only weeks after the Muslim Brotherhood broke its promise not to enter a candidate in the upcoming presidential race in Egypt, that nation’s election commission has barred 10 candidates from participating — including the one chosen by the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, the ban of a former official from the Mubarak government and two Islamist extremists has removed the three front-runners in the contest, and with the election only a few weeks away, the ban raises the question of who will be on the ballot that will be acceptable to a majority of Egyptian voters.

Record warm temperatures throughout mid-March have had at least one predictable outcome: the global warming alarmism is back in fashion this Spring. Despite the fact that even advocates of the theory are only willing to say that manmade climate change "likely contributed on the order of 5% to 10% of the magnitude of the heat wave during 12-23 March," this fact is being kept far from the headlines.

The theory of a human cause for global warming received another serious setback as dozens of former NASA scientists and astronauts called upon the American space agency to rely on actual evidence — rather than computer models — in the study of the controversial theory.

A new scientific study of the Himalayan glaciers is raising fresh doubts about the troubled theory of manmade climate change, and could renew interest in a debacle that shook the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) several years ago.

While the presidential candidates of both major American political parties are spending far less time on the troubled relationship between the United States and Mexico in this year’s election cycle than they did in 2008, a report from Proceso magazine indicates that the descent of America’s southern neighbor into utter chaos cannot be ignored forever. The Proceso exposé details the success of the “Los Zetas” cartel in infiltrating various levels of Mexico’s military, law enforcement, and other elements of the nation’s government, and it casts the future of that nation as a struggle between various cartels.

As cartel-related violence continues virtually unabated in Mexico's Ciudad Juárez, thousands of police officers in that city of 1.3 million people have fled their homes and now must live in hotels to conceal their identity. The government-funded relocation follows a month in which eight police officers were murdered as part of a systematic campaign by one of the cartels to attempt to force the resignation of the city’s police chief. Banners around the city have threatened the death of a police officer a day until Police Chief Julian Leyzaola resigns his office.

When the police department from the municipality of Ahome in the Mexican state of Sinaloa were summoned to meet with the director of state police, they thought they were going to discuss routine operations. Instead, they were disarmed and the 32 officers and commanders who make up the entire department were arrested for their connection with Los Zetas and the Beltran Leyva cartels.

Five years into President Felipe Calderon’s war with the drug cartels, a growing number of Mexicans are tired of shopworn excuses from a government which appears to be incapable of protecting the public from murderers and kidnappers. Life in a country which is increasingly being recognized as a “failed state” is leading more and more citizens to the realization that self-defense is the right and responsibility of every human being. That realization is leading to more and more Mexicans procuring firearms, often despite the Mexican regime’s harsh laws regulating their ownership.

Less than a month after Mexico’s highest-ranking law-enforcement official declared it would be at least four more years before drug violence begins to subside, 11 members of one police department have been kidnapped — including the chief of police.