The Department of Homeland Security is raising an alarm over a wave of cyber attacks from the Middle East that has targeted the processing systems of US energy companies. The NYT reports: “We are concerned by these intrusions, and we are trying to make sure they don’t lead to something much bigger, as they did […]

We all knew Detroit had it bad, but we had no idea it was this bad.Today DC bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn Orr, appointed by the state as Detroit’s emergency manager, issued a report to the state treasurer detailing the city’s growing costs and dwindling revenue totaling more than $15 billion in debts and long-term liabilities. Bloomberg reports: […]

Tuition costs at private universities may be plateauing, but not at public schools. Government spending on public colleges has been on the budget chopping block, so many public schools have been raising tuition to make up for the lost funds.While students at these schools are feeling the pinch, however, presidents are doing extremely well for […]

Wile E. Coyote, meet Road Runner. Notwithstanding the State Department’s tone-deaf attempts to ban them last week, blueprints for the Liberator 3D printable gun have been downloaded more than 100,000 times and have been mirrored on a variety of blogs and sites like the Pirate Bay, the NY Times reported. As planned by Defense Distributed, the anarcho-libertarian outfit […]

David Cameron is in Washington this week, and Syria is among the things he is most keen to talk about with President Obama. Cameron, who spoke at length with Vladimir Putin about the Syrian crisis this weekend in Sochi, walked away feeling pretty good. UK’s Telegraph reports that Cameron felt the meetings were “extremely positive” and […]

Iran’s looming elections in June got a bit more interesting over the weekend.First, a criminal complaint was opened against President Ahmadinejad by Iran’s Guardian Council, a committee of powerful clerics who interpret Iran’s constitution and supervise the elections. The complaint against Ahmadinejad is for openly endorsing Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, his close adviser, whom he’s been grooming to succeed him. […]

The attack on the Boston marathon vividly highlighted, with anguish unparalleled in the post-9/11 period, the security challenge posed to the United States by terrorism. Unlike the attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, however, these attacks were perpetrated not by terrorists from the Middle East or Southeast Asia but from the Russian North […]

Last week we got some bad news from a Hawaiian volcano. Not an eruption, but an emissions measurement that has far greater global significance. At a facility on Mauna Loa, instruments measured carbon dioxide levels at 400 parts per million for the first time. It’s a nice round number, and though it’s not a number […]

When people debate issues like climate change and health care, they frequently talk as if tomorrow’s solutions will be built on today’s technology. That’s a mistake. As technological progress accelerates, policymakers should keep in mind that many of our most pressing problems will be solved by solutions we haven’t yet imagined.The recent shale boom is […]

Last Sunday we introduced the Big Five: a series of challenges that will make or break America’s in the 21st century. Of those Big Five, the most pressing and urgent issue to today’s economy is the jobs crisis, which we profiled in this week’s essay: This is more than the problem of recovering from the […]