We’ve devoted considerable space on this blog documenting the ways in which student debt prevents young people from beginning their lives as adults. A study from Demos, for example, finds that among college graduates, those without student debt are more likely to own a home and enjoy lower interest rates on their mortgages. But the effects […]

An internal Communist Party memo, seen by the New York Times and confirmed by at least four high ranking officials, underscores President Xi Jinping’s desire to shore up Party control over the state. Document #9 apparently describes seven “perils” that threaten the Party, according to the Times: The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting […]

Israel is already drilling for natural gas offshore in the Mediterranean, but in the coming years it is expected to ramp up production of the more than 40 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas in the region’s Levant basin. So is Cyprus, which discovered its own field in 2011 with an estimated 7 tcf of […]

Billionaire wildcatter Audrey McClendon, the co-founder and former CEO of oil and gas drilling giant Chesapeake Energy, is betting big on a new fracking front in Ohio. McClendon is hoping that southeast Ohio’s Utica shale formation will prove to be as profitable as North Dakota’s Bakken formation or Texas’s Barnett shale. The WSJ reports: Mr. McClendon’s deal-making […]

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has been a vocal supporter of Obamacare, but in his latest piece he stops just short of calling Obama’s recent remarks on rate spikes a lie. The piece, entitled “Obama Made a Misleading Statement About Obamacare Rates,” considers Obama’s claim that those currently uninsured will get “significantly cheaper” insurance rates under the […]

Blue states like California and Illinois are  struggling meeting obligations for their own public pension funds, so they certainly don’t need this latest bit of news—their tax bases are shrinking drastically. A new study on state-by-state income migration from the Tax Foundation (h/t WSJ), found that New York, California, and Illinois—the largest blue states in […]

Reports are emerging today of a horrific chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus. Reuters initially put the tally at “over 200” dead. An opposition group counted 494 dead. George Sabra, an opposition official, said 1,300 people had died. Images and videos of children and women and elderly and ordinary people, dead without visible […]

The British Catholic journal The Tablet carried a story on August 3, 2013 that I found suggestive (although its topic is not terribly interesting in itself). The story reports on the surprising growth in England of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Oratory. This is not a monastic order but a community of secular priests, […]

For Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, it’s Jews all the way down. The Gezi Park protests were apparently the fault of a shadowy “interest rate lobby”, and now he informs us that Israel was behind Egypt’s ouster of its Islamist president Mohammed Morsi: “What do they say in Egypt? Democracy is not the ballot box. What […]

The alarm bells are going off in Asia: China, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India are all facing negative economic news. And some are beginning to worry that we could be back to the conditions of the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “All this QE [quantitative easing] money has lead to a massive credit inflation bubble in Asia,” said […]