While the unemployment rate remains stubbornly above 8 percent, some good news emerged from the Commerce Department today. From the Wall Street Journal: Retail and food-service sales increased 0.8% last month to a seasonally adjusted $403.93 billion, the Commerce Department said Tuesday. That was the biggest jump since February.Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires expected a […]

The funding crisis at the City College of San Francisco will seem like small potatoes compared to the budget problems facing the state’s public universities. The Economist has the story: CALIFORNIA’S public universities were once the envy of the world. Under the state’s pioneering “master plan” for higher education, signed into law in 1960, the top […]

One of the world’s top journalists, Chrystia Freeland, brings some powerful new evidence forward that supports Via Meadia’s view about an age of energy abundance. Reporting on a Harvard study about the implications of new sources of oil and gas across the world, Freeland writes: Thanks in part to technologies like horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking, […]

“India is at last getting good at making things—but not in quite the way its founding fathers envisioned,” writes the Economist. Driven by manufacturers of electrical equipment, car parts, and the cars themselves, Indian engineering and manufacturing is finally taking off: manufacturing increased to 15 percent of India’s GDP in 2011.As the Economist notes, no major […]

A worsening drought in the U.S., a disappointing monsoon in India, locusts in Africa, the bacon shortage in Europe: world food prices are starting to rise as the bad news rolls in. While there’s not much to be done about the weather, there are calls on the G20 countries to convene an emergency summit to […]

The defected Syrian Prime Minister Riad Hijab announced this morning that the Assad regime is near collapse, claiming they now only control 30% of the country. The New York Times, however, rightly cautions against premature celebration. It might be rebel PR: Mr. Hijab’s claims about the weakness of the Assad government could not be independently verified, and […]

EU consumers will soon have a harder time bringing home the bacon, literally. Bacon prices in Europe are forecast to rise significantly due to new EU legislation aimed at improving animal welfare.As The Guardian reports, a partial ban on sow stalls beginning in January 2013, along with with rising pig feed costs due to the […]

It was the best of times, but it may soon be the worst of times for the Chinese economy, says Tyler Cowen.Subscribers to the Keynesian school of economics think China’s government can solve its economic problems: Keynesians would argue that Beijing has the tools to stoke aggregate demand. It could, for example, adjust interest rates […]

In an interview following the recent attack by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Hakkari, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan threatened that if the PKK continues to use Syrian territory as a staging ground his government would conduct cross-border operations (CNNTurk). The next day, the Turkish press heralded the flight of Syrian Prime Minister […]

In Nigeria, security forces killed 20 people yesterday. Who were those killed? Terrorists, says the government; civilians, says Boko Haram. Reuters reports: The Nigerian Islamist sect Boko Haram denied on Monday that 20 of its fighters had been killed in a raid by security forces in the northeastern city of Maiduguri the day before, saying all […]