The euro crisis hasn’t gone away; it has metastasized. A cancer of the monetary system has spread to other vital organs throughout the body of the patient. Economies are collapsing across the zone, as people face year after year of recession, contraction, and unemployment. Policymakers offer no plans when confronted with what is entirely a […]

 Illinois’ troubles are about to get much worse. On Wednesday, Governor Pat Quinn unveiled what some are calling the state’s “worst-ever budget” and blasted legislators for doing nothing about the state’s $96 billion unfunded pension liability. Another two years of stasis and President Obama’s home state will officially be “spending more on public pensions than […]

Yesterday we wrote about the blue civil war that could rip the Democratic Party down the middle, but today Republican leaders faced a smaller civil war of their own. Around 1 a.m. some Senate Republicans, led by tea partier Rand Paul, ended a thirteen hour filibuster protesting the confirmation of John Brennan to the CIA. More […]

Tired of your commute? You’re not alone: the average American commute is 25.4 minutes each way. Working off data released by the US Census Bureau this week, WNYC threw together an excellent national map of average commute times by zip code. Find your city down below and compare your commute to the averages, and when […]

Obama’s call for universal preschool access, one of the few concrete proposals in an otherwise bland State of the Union Address, was the culmination of an idea inspired by the success of programs like the Perry Preschool Program. There has been some research to suggest that children who attend preschool regularly go on to lead more successful […]

Not every autocratic rogue state can threaten the US with a “pre-emptive nuclear attack” and have it laughed off. To make such a threat and incur so little concern from Washington requires a bizarre combination of psychosis, incompetence, and inanity that only North Korea seems to have mastered.But then again, this latest stunt likely isn’t […]

Health insurance costs are skyrocketing in California, where many citizens will soon face double digit premium hikes. According to the LA Times, Blue Shield of California and Aetna Inc recently announced premium “increases that average more than 11 percent for about 47,000 individual and small-business policyholders.” California health bureaucrats are understandably unhappy and blame the insurance companies for the new rates.But their anger is misdirected. […]

Corn-based ethanol starves the world’s poor and increases greenhouse gas emissions, yet the US is intent on propping it up with ill-conceived mandates. Many fuel suppliers and oil refiners have been forced to buy credits to meet these quotas, and the price of these credits has risen a staggering 1,400 percent since the start of […]

Sporting a North Face cap and a thick red beard, Omar Abu al-Chechen might be northern Syria’s most recognizable rebel leader. Except he isn’t from Syria; he’s from the Caucasus, the troubled region in Russia home to decades-long insurgencies that pit Moscow against determined Islamic militants.“Truly today there is a chance to establish (an Islamic state) […]

A new study has put Moore’s law to the test and found it to be a much more powerfully predictive tool than originally thought, applicable to a wide range of technologies. (Moore’s law observes that roughly every two years, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles.) Nature reports: [Researchers] compared several mathematical laws that purport […]