Bo Xilai kept up a feisty defense as his trial, the prosecution of the highest-ranking Communist Party official in decades, continued for a second day on Friday. After a video interview with Bo’s wife was played in which she detailed the shady purchase of a villa in France (she then transferred her shares to the […]

California, which made big Obamacare headlines a few months ago for its misleading premium comparisons, is back with more bad news. It turns out that the state isn’t sure it will be able to launch its online insurance exchange by the October 1st deadline. WSJ: The spokesman said the agency is still doing checks, and […]

Reuters reports that many public pension funds are enjoying double-digit returns for fiscal year 2013. That’s considerably higher than the expected rate of return for public pensions, which often falls somewhere between 7 and 9 percent, and much higher than their recent returns, which have in many cases been in the low single digits. Although […]

Britain is the latest battleground where advocates  and opponents of fracking are arguing over the controversial method of extracting oil and gas from shale. The British Geological Survey doubled its estimates of the country’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves earlier this summer. Green activists have stalled exploratory drilling in the tiny village of Balcombe, prompting […]

Black smoke billowed above Tripoli, a large port city in northern Lebanon, this morning after explosions hit two mosques; early reports say that at least 27 people were killed and 400 wounded. The Taqwa and Salam mosques have hosted some of the most vitriolic of Lebanon’s Sunni preachers who have been criticizing Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group […]

Local governments across the country are cutting back on employee hours in anticipation of the Affordable Care Act. WaPo has a rundown of recent examples: Middletown Township, New Jersey is cutting back hours for 25 part-time workers; Bee County, Tex., is capping part-time hours at 24 per week; Brevard County, Fla., is pursuing similar policies. More: “It’s not […]

The shale revolution has largely been an American phenomenon. US geology is particularly suited to horizontal well drilling, and shale operations in countries like China and Australia have to contend with water scarcity. Europe’s shale has been blocked by the continent’s greens, and though the UK has made most of the region’s headlines recently for […]

Now that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing is official, the battle between Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and union leaders over the health of the city’s pensions has taken center stage. The key question is: How healthy are the city’s pensions, exactly? As we’ve seen before, it’s a difficult question to answer, as relatively minor-seeming changes in the […]

In early August, TAI editor Adam Garfinkle sat down with General Michael V. Hayden in his Washington office to talk about recent intelligence-related headlines and what is behind those headlines. General Hayden, a retired Air Force Four-Star, has served as director of the National Security Agency (1999–2005), as Principal Deputy to the Director of National Intelligence (2005–06) and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006–09). Here is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Even a well-designed law can have unintended effects that worsen the problems it was meant to solve—and a slipshod law like Obamacare threatens to cause serious damage. UPS, for instance, has decided to stop offering insurance to employee spouses who can get insurance from their own employer. The company cites the new costs imposed by Obamacare, […]