So it turns out the French are up to almost the same things as their friends in the UK’s GCHQ and the US’s NSA: the French government has its own top-secret cyber-snooping operation going, according to Le Monde. VM‘s French is a little rusty, so forgive us any clumsy wording in the following: The intelligence services are looking at […]

As part of our ongoing project to update and improve the core documents of American history, we re-present the opening sections of the Declaration of Independence as they ought to have been written, and indeed as it would have been written if the still primitive colonial political process had only been sophisticated enough to restrict […]

Pension managers have become fond of running to Wall Street looking for help managing their funds. But they don’t seem to be getting their money’s worth. A new study conducted by the Maryland Public Policy Institute and the Maryland Tax Education Foundation examined the performance of a number of public pension systems around the country […]

China’s shale gas reserves—the largest in the world—are nearly double the size of America’s, but the country isn’t even close to catching up to the US shale boom, as analysts say it will be woefully short of self-imposed drilling targets. It turns out that simply having the resource under territory you control isn’t enough to […]

Two high-profile Portugese ministers have resigned in protest of austerity measures enacted as part of 2011’s €78 billion bailout. Until recently, Portugal has managed to stay out of the headlines, meeting its creditors’ demands while navigating the kinds of public outcry over belt-tightening austerity measures that has thrown Greece, Italy, and Spain for a loop […]

Reports of the its imminent demise notwithstanding, the immigration bill passed by the Senate last week has higher education administrators ecstatic. Under the terms of the bill, foreign-born students who earn PhDs at American schools would be eligible for green cards, and those who earn master’s or PhDs in STEM fields at schools outside the […]

We predicted that once the election was over the mainstream media would shift to a tougher stance on President Obama’s foreign policy. Evidence confirming our prediction just keeps rolling in.The New York Times has suddenly noticed some troubling flaws in The One’s approach to the Middle East. The Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief and White House correspondent can’t help […]

The first step towards recovery is admitting you have a problem. The EU voted this morning to try and fix its broken carbon market. The bloc’s emissions trading system (ETS) issues permits allowing manufacturers to emit carbon dioxide. If they emit more than their permits allow, they have to buy more permits from firms that […]

The leader of a Chechen separatist group urged his followers to use “maximum force” to attack the 2014 Winter Olympics in a new video posted online today. He also rescinded a 2012 pledge not to attack targets in Russia.Russia plans “to hold the Olympics on the bones of our ancestors, on the bones of many, many […]

Oregon is considering a plan to allow students to attend state schools without taking out loans or even paying any tuition upfront. The catch? Under a plan called, “Pay It Forward, Pay It Back,” once the students graduate, they would pay 3 percent of their salaries into a special fund for 24 years. The WSJ […]