If Detroit were a country, it would fit comfortably into the Failed States Index. The NYT’s front-page analysis today asserts that the city’s daily struggle to survive is worse than the estimated $18 billion in debt, worse than the potential fire sale of the city’s art, its parks, and its airports. Detroit’s residents can no longer count […]

The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture banned Chinese fishing boats from operating near North Korea today, another sign of a deteriorating relationship.Apparently North Korea requested that all Chinese trawlers buy North Korean fuel instead of making their own arrangements. The Chinese authorities protested that this would “severely compromise the normal operations and safety of Chinese vessels,” according to the […]

It seems like a story right out of a science fiction novel. Texas doctors will soon remotely preform operations on patients in China…using robots. Quartz: The Shenzhen People’s Hospital in China and the Methodist Hospital in Houston have agreed to work together to allow surgical operations to be performed remotely using advanced robotics, reports the Shenzhen Economic […]

Good news: the federal budget deficit has entered a period of rapid decline as the economy slowly recovers, the cost of overseas wars falls, and the sequester bites. For 2013, we’re looking at a projected deficit of $759 billion, or 4.7 percent of GDP. The FT: Throughout Barack Obama’s first term in office, the recession and […]

It’s easy to get carried away by the optimistic rhetoric that has accompanied the US shale boom. The oil and gas windfall has dramatically changed the global energy landscape and significantly brightened America’s energy future, creating jobs, boosting industry, lowering US emissions, and lessening our dependence on foreign oil.But one thing it hasn’t done is […]

Religion and politics are never far apart in the Promised Land, but a new intra-religious civil war with a characteristically Israeli mix of high-octane ideology and gutter-level politicking has lately been grabbing the headlines. Unseemly as the whole thing is, the conflict has at least one virtue: It is laying some fundamental questions of commitment […]

A couple news agencies released leaked copies today of the Abbottabad Commission Report, the Pakistani government’s investigation into the May 2 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound. The report is scathing. It slams the Pakistani government on two fronts: for allowing an international fugitive to hide, ostensibly without anyone knowing, in Pakistani territory for nine years, […]

That is the picture of a traditional college student? Most of us imagine an 18–21 year old, living on a campus far from home. But recent data compiled by the Wall Street Journal shows that that’s far from the case: First of all, more than 40% of all undergraduates in the 2011-2012 school year were […]

America’s public schools are educating students for a world that no longer exists.  A case in point is the Perkins Act, which funds vocational training in schools—a reasonable project, except that the training is far outdated. Stan Litow, a VP at IBM, writes in USNews:  [The Act funds] education programs that look a lot like what […]

The Chinese tend to be leery of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and the deputy general secretary of a provincial soybean association in China recently stoked their fears. Conflating correlation with causation, Wang Xiaoyu noted that Chinese regions with high GMO consumption also had relatively high rates of cancer, concluding that GMOs make people “more vulnerable […]