Russia continues to show respect and appreciation for the White House, this time by breaking protocol and outing the CIA’s Moscow station chief. The Guardian has the story: Speaking to Russia’s Interfax news agency, the FSB spokesman said his agency had complained to the CIA station chief as far back as October 2011 “that if […]

Baby Boomers have lost, on average, 117 thousand dollars in retirement savings to unexpected “retirement derailers,” according to a recent Ameriprise Financial survey. CNN money reports: Nearly all, or 90%, of those surveyed, had experienced at least one economic or life event that hurt their retirement savings. And nearly 40% of respondents said they had been hit […]

Don’t tell Sean Penn, but Venezuela is imploding. WaPo reports that demand for the US dollar is skyrocketing in the country, whose weak economy is pushing people onto a shady currency black market: Because the bolivar is artificially overvalued and practically worthless outside of Venezuela, everyone here is desperate for dollars, from auto-part importers to supermarkets […]

Asking a fellow student on a date may now get you kicked off a college campus. Following a year long investigation into the University of Montana’s handling of several sexual assault cases, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights (OCR) issued a joint letter to the university in […]

Retiring early can make you depressed and unhealthy, as well as poor, according to a new study by the Institute of Economic Affairs, a British think tank. The IEA looked at micro-level data from 11 countries on the physical and mental health of retirees. Here were some of the report’s findings: – Retirement increases the […]

Japan’s PM Shinzo Abe backtracked yesterday on previous comments he made in which he suggested that he did not agree with the famous 1995 apology by then-Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama. Murayama apologized to neighboring countries like China and Korea for Japanese aggression during World War II. Abe, a nationalist, has said on several occasions that he might […]

There is a lot of bad blood between the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudi form of Islam, and those tensions are likely to become more visible as the Brotherhood continues to gain influence in the Arab world.“The Brotherhood has done great damage to Saudi Arabia,” the late Saudi Crown Prince Nayef Bin Abdel-Aziz said after the […]

Less than half the money exacted from Illinois taxpayers to pay for roads is actually used to pay for roads. The Illinois Auditor General has found that, of the $5.7 billion in the state’s road fund over the past two years, $2.7 billion went to cover salaries at the Illinois Department of Transportation, bond debt […]

Militiamen murder women and children and extinguish entire family lines. A rebel commander executes a dozen men on video. Another eats the heart of an enemy. “These are the images of Syrian conflict,” Reuters reports, “the first war in which the prevalence of camera phones and Internet access has allowed hundreds of gruesome war crimes to […]

Christie’s auction house in New York raked in $495 million in art sales Wednesday, setting the record for the the largest single evening of sales in auction history. The evening’s sales featured art by Jackson Pollock, Roy Lichtenstein, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. The art market has been seeing high returns for several years now, but industry experts […]