Earlier this week we wrote about Israel’s progress toward extracting its gas bounty, and noted that its next challenge will be figuring out how to get that gas to market. It has nearly 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that will likely find its way to Europe by pipeline, either underneath the Mediterranean or […]

In April we warned that dozens of cities in New York State were facing financial catastrophe stemming from underfunded pension liabilities. It turns out that we may have been lowballing it. Moody’s has just announced that the Long Island town of Huntington, NY could be downgraded for repeatedly delaying pension payments to fund short-term projects. […]

The price of carbon in California hit its lowest point this year at the most recent quarterly auction of emissions allowances. The price per metric ton of carbon was lower than expected, down 13 percent from the last auction in May. As Bloomberg reports, the low price was likely due to California’s stated plan to give […]

The college affordability plan President Obama has been touting all week was finally released this morning, and universities are already paying close attention. The core idea is relatively simple: Building on the “college scorecard” idea, in which colleges are publicly ranked on criteria including tuition costs, student loan debt, graduation rates and average income of […]

Reports of anti-Christian violence have been filtering out of Egypt for weeks now, but a new report by the Human Right’s Commission paints a comprehensive picture of the persecution. At least 37 churches have been burned or damaged, and survivors of some of the attacks have harrowing tales to tell: Another Dalga resident, Sameer Lamie, […]

Vestas is a Danish company that manufactures wind turbines, and it used to be the global leader in its industry. Things look much different at the company now, after its CEO was sacked on Wednesday in the face of plummeting profits and market share. Share prices are down 85 percent from this time five years […]

Bo Xilai’s trial, the prosecution of the highest-profile Chinese statesman in decades, started in China this morning. Onlookers were roundly surprised by Bo’s feisty defense and denials of wrongdoing: he claimed to have never received bribes from Xu Ming, a businessman who testified to providing Bo and his family with $3.3 million in exchange for help […]

While France’s foreign minister demanded that “a reaction of force must be taken” if it turns out Assad was behind yesterday’s chemical weapons attack in Damascus, Time is reporting that the tone coming out of the White House is decidedly… less decisive: “We are calling for this U.N. investigation to be conducted,” said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest. […]

Iran’s got a new oil minister, and he’s keen on ramping up the country’s oil production capacity and, eventually, its production. Bijan Zanganeh is seen as a much more technocratic appointee than his predecessor, and has a proven track record—he was Iran’s oil minister during the country’s so-called “golden age” of production in the late nineties […]

A new study released yesterday by the Kaiser foundation found that in 2013 health care premiums went up 4 percent for families and 5 percent for individuals. That’s down from the 10 percent increases we saw in the early aughts. Obamacare supporters have been quick to grab it as a political football, arguing that this data proves […]