A lot has changed in the US energy mix over the past ten years. The shale boom gave America a new source of oil and halved the price of natural gas. This new flood of cheap gas has undercut other energy sources, hitting Old King Coal especially hard: the US is burning less of its […]

President Benigno Aquino III of the Philippines said today that he would not visit China for a trade fair next week after being told by Beijing that he should visit at a more convenient time. China then told the Associated Press it had never invited him in the first place.The snub, whether the result of a […]

Readers of this blog will by now have become familiar with my cognitive preference for free association. I read something about Brazil, which reminds me about something in China, the two items together have an implication for a theory of mine. If the currently fashionable brain science is right, this predilection of mine may be […]

Fresh off the heels of a top advisor to Putin declaring Ukraine’s potential deal with the EU “suicidal,” Ukrainian Prime Minister Mykola Azarov is firing back, telling Moscow to start coming to terms with a more Western-looking Ukraine. “Ukraine will create a free trade zone with the EU – this also has to be inevitably […]

Teachers’ unions may stop Mexican President Enrique Peña’s reform agenda with widespread new protests against his educational reforms. Peña wants to make teacher evaluations mandatory, and empower administrators to fire poorly performing teachers.  As early as last week, Peña’s team was certain that these reforms would pass through the country’s legislature, but in light of the protests its […]

After years in which California’s credit rating ranked among the worst in the nation, the state has completed a massive, $764 million bond sale in which it enjoyed quite favorable interest rates. The Wall Street Journal reports that the premium (the additional interest the state offers compared with AAA rated bonds) was 0.45 percent, down from […]

In a move calculated to avoid conflicts with France’s powerful unions, the French government announced yesterday a number of changes to the country’s pension system. While the official minimum retirement age of 62 will remain unchanged, the number of years of work required to collect a pension is set to rise from 41.5 to 43 […]

Did the Chinese Communist Party just drop a hint that reforms are coming? The political bureau of the Party said in an official statement today that it will “discuss deepening reform in an all-round way” at a November meeting of the Party’s central committee. Xinhua reports: Deepening reform in an all-round way concerns the overall […]

The Obama administration delayed yet another part of the health care law Tuesday, informing insurers that it won’t sign off on new health care plans until two weeks later than planned. Two weeks may not seem like a long time, but the new deadline in mid-September is running pretty hard up against the October 1st […]

“Industrial scale oil theft, sabotage and technical problems” have caused output from the oil-rich Niger delta to plummet to a four-year low, the FT reports, and that’s only the beginning of the story.Shell announced in July that thieves were stealing 60,000 barrels of oil every day—just from Shell’s lines. The Nigerian government, which gets 80 […]