Japan is under fire at Davos this week, accused of juicing its own economy at the expense of its trading partners. Earlier this week, Japan pledged to begin printing money in an attempt to bring down the yen and stay competitive against Chinese manufacturing. This has drawn pointed criticism and raised fears of a global […]

Shale gas is coming to Ukraine, and Russia is fuming. Earlier today Ukraine signed a groundbreaking deal, potentially worth $10 billion, with Royal Dutch Shell to develop the country’s vast natural gas resources. The Financial Times has the story: The production-sharing agreement . . . signed in Davos in the presence of President Viktor Yanukovich […]

If you’re thinking of co-signing for your child’s college loan, let the borrower beware. One grieving mother learned the hard way what this means. According to the FT, when Ella Edwards’s son Jermaine died at 24 years old, she planned to enter retirement and quietly cope with her loss. Instead, she was forced back to work as […]

Need a new kidney? Or skin tissue? How about blood vessels? One day soon you might be able to get all these things cheaply and on demand thanks to BioCurious, a group of engineers seeking to build an affordable 3D printer that churns out biomaterial cell by living cell.Bio-printers, Wired reports, “have the potential to change the […]

The Pentagon may have an even larger problem than sequestration: trillions of dollars in unfunded pension liabilities. Over the past few decades, military pension costs have inflated rapidly with no signs of slowing down: The liability currently stands at $1.2 trillion and is expected to rise to nearly $3 trillion over the next quarter-century. Along with […]

North Korea’s latest bluster about missiles and nuke tests will embarrass China, alarm South Korea and Japan, and generally contribute to enhanced cooperation among the Pacific Rim nations worried that China and its deranged ally are destabilizing the region. The North Koreans have made life easier for those in Japan who want to change the […]

Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi has never learned the first rule of holes: when he’s in one he keeps on digging. Defending himself against accusations of anti-Semitism, he made things worse. At a meeting last week in Cairo, six U.S. senators asked Morsi to distance himself from his 2010 remarks that Jews are “bloodsuckers” and “the […]

Move over, America, there’s a new shale oil giant in town. An Australian drilling company found a huge shale oil deposit potentially containing enough oil to match the reserves of Saudi Arabia. Australia News brings us the story: Brisbane company Linc Energy yesterday released two reports, based on drilling and seismic exploration, estimating the amount of […]

[As regular VM readers know we have been writing about the decline of the “blue social model” — which you can read more about here and here.]While many ask whether the blue social model has a future, it may be more interesting to ask what kind of future the blue social model offers. Blue opinion […]

Peter Berger has a fantastic new post on his AI blog on the complexities of secularism in the West. Some recent cases limiting religious expression in public spaces led him to connect Western secularism with Christian teachings on sexuality: Let me venture a sociological hypothesis here: The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the […]