Bo Xilai was indicted on charges of extortion, bribery, and abusing power today, and he will soon be put on trial, according to officials at the court in Shandong province where the charges were filed. Bo’s sentence could range from 15–20 years in prison to a suspended death sentence, analysts say, but his trial will […]

It looks as though direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will begin again after a three-year-plus hiatus, probably in Washington, sometime during the next week or so. What does it all mean, for the protagonists, for the wider region and for U.S. foreign policy?For starters, it means John Kerry has landed on the map of history. No one […]

The U.S. Government Accountability Office has released a new report that offers the most comprehensive data to date on the current costs of health insurance across all 50 states. At Wonkblog, Sarah Kliff used the report to compare the current costs of insurance to the predicted costs of insurance under the ACA (which, we’ve said, wonks should have been […]

Among China’s heavily indebted provincial and local governments, Jiangsu stands out. Two of its main industries, shipbuilding and solar panels, are “drowning in overcapacity,” Reuters reports. Several districts and cities have resorted to unorthodox ways of bringing in revenue fast, like refusing to pay civil servants, refusing to compensate landowners for land sold to developers, […]

A recent WSJ/NBC news poll has some data that might shock Democrats: Wendy Davis and her sneakers aside, a plurality of Americans support 20 week abortion bans of the kind passed in Texas. Forty-four percent of respondents said they would support the ban, with 37 percent opposed. And the numbers get more interesting the further down […]

The melting Arctic could release vast reserves of methane into the atmosphere, ultimately costing the world’s economy $60 trillion, according to a new study. Released last week in the journal Nature, the study’s authors paint a grim portrait of a world in which melting Arctic ice leads to permafrost thawing in Russia, exposing mass quantities of the extremely […]

Argentina was hoping to have some powerful allies in its courtroom showdown with holdout creditors such as Elliot Capital Management, a New York-based hedge fund that was notably responsible for impounding an Argentine tall ship off the coast of Ghana late last year. But now both the US Treasury and the IMF are backing away […]

In 2009, President Obama signed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (better known simply as the Recovery Act) in a bid to use government dollars to jump start a flagging US economy. The Act allocated more than half a billion dollars to the Department of Labor to create green jobs. Now, four and a half years […]

Vice President Joe Biden’s speech at the Mumbai stock exchange was chock-full of colorful flattery and ambitious rhetoric: “Imagine what our two countries can achieve together, not only for one another but for the economic and political stability of the region,” he told the packed auditorium, as the NYT reports. “It is time we take this […]

On Tuesday the Journal of American Medicine published the results of a survey asking doctors which actors in the health care system are most responsible for reducing costs. WaPo reports on the surprising findings: Based on their findings, 59 percent of doctors believed they have some responsibility in holding down health care costs. Only 36 […]