National Post

National Post readers eager for good news in the war against terrorism, rejoice. On the pages that follow, authors Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank outline a stunning phenomenon: In the prisons of Cairo and the mosques of London, on the blogosphere and the airwaves of Arabic cable TV channels, militant jihadis are turning away from al-Qaeda's nihilistic agenda. Personal attacks against Osama bin Laden, once taboo, are now common in jihadi circles...

"Encoded in the DNA of apocalyptic jihadist groups like… more

..."I think the important lesson is - they get a range of savings that is reasonable. It suggests there is a growing consensus that these elements are what are needed for change to happen," said Len Nichols, a healthcare economist at the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan research group...LINK

For weeks, drivers in central Canada have been worrying about their next fill-up, lining up at the pumps to pay skyrocketing prices for fuel when they can find it. For the first time in years we have seen stations run dry and rationing in those with supplies. Although the shortage was temporary and caused by a freakish combination of events -- problems at two refineries coupled with a train workers' strike -- it nonetheless should serve as a long overdue… more

Five years after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan remains hooked on opium. The drug trade has become the country's largest employer, its biggest export and the largest source of income and credit in a land devastated by decades of war...So pervasive is the trade that Afghanistan is at risk of becoming a lawless narco-state where drug dealers will determine who holds power. Even now it is a major source of corruption that undermines the fledgling government of… more

Equality at the legislative level, not individual rights, was the cause of the American Revolution. What the colonists sought is not unlike the Commonwealth of today and would have changed history. more

A specter is haunting the world at the turn of the twenty-first century: the specter of regionalism. The experiments in confederation of the European Union—of which the most important is the adoption of the Euro as a pan-European currency—are thought by many to signal a movement from national sovereignty to regional integration,… more