When Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto unveiled a proposal to reform his country’s state-owned and grossly mismanaged oil and gas monopoly Pemex last week, he was careful to reassure the public that “all hydrocarbons will remain the property of the Mexican people.” Peña Nieto promised to open up Mexico’s oil and gas reserves to foreign companies via […]

A group of Japanese nationalists who belong to a group called Ganbare Nippon (“Stand Firm, Japan”) has returned to port after sailing around the disputed Senkaku islands in the East China Sea. The five ships were surrounded by Japanese coast guard ships and urged to leave the area. NBC News reports: Members of the…group did not […]

The colossal scope of student debt in America is no longer a secret, but the federal government has yet to take its proper share of the blame for the crisis. In an excellent piece at Rolling Stone, Matt Taibbi homes in on how government lending practices have inflated the bubble, and documents many abuses of federal […]

Americans may misunderstand how Egyptians see the struggle between the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, but according to Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian blogger who came to worldwide prominence after the initial Arab Spring uprisings, the misunderstandings run deep in both directions. He offers corrections to what he says are Egyptians’ top-three misconceptions: The US is […]

Scientists are “95 percent” sure that humans are the main cause of recent global warming (up from 90 percent in 2007), but they’re much less confident about what the effects of that warming will be. That’s according to information leaked to Reuters from an upcoming report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).The IPCC’s […]

India’s economic difficulties have dominated MSM headlines over the past couple of weeks, along with tragedies like a submarine explosion that likely killed more than a dozen navy men and the worst fighting along the border with Pakistan in decades. The New York Times calls it India’s “summer of difficulties.”“India is now the sick man […]

In the first half of 2012, US manufacturing posted some of the best numbers we’ve seen in years, suggesting that a broader revival may be underway. Our trade deficit has grown noticeably smaller in the past six months, driven in large part by energy exports, the “reshoring” of factories to America, and the cooling off […]

Mobile technology—tablets, smartphones, and laptops—are enabling companies to set up flexible remote work on scales previously unimaginable. But while these increasingly distributed intra-office networks create a host of benefits for employees, they also pose big challenges for employers, as Ars Technica reports.Security, for one, remains a big concern, especially when trade secrets can be stolen from […]

To suspend aid to Egypt or not? Ever since the bloodletting across Egypt accelerated last week, an increasing number of Senators and Congressmen have been lining up to demand that President Obama halt disbursements of the $1.5 billion annual aid package to Egypt’s heavy-handed military-backed government. Various EU leaders have joined the chorus in their respective […]

In early 2010 President Obama set a stretch goal for the United States: double our exports in five years. It was the kind of seemingly fantastical five-year plan you might expect from China, which has been able to leverage its outsized population and natural resources to produce extraordinary growth (though that growth has recently tapered […]