Last month Politico reported that Congressmen were looking to exempt themselves and their staff from the insurance exchanges they are mandated to join under Obamacare. They feared that premiums would be too high for an average Hill staffer on a shoestring salary. Now there’s a new twist in the story: a group Senators, Representatives, and congressional aides are […]

Scientists may have found a way to power electronic devices with just a fraction of the energy they currently use, and it’s all thanks to graphene, a much-hyped material with some remarkable properties.Graphene has been hailed as a “miracle material,” but its structure is fairly simple. It’s just a sheet of carbon molecules, connected in a […]

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has had four years to figure out how to prevent another international embarrassment like the Green Revolution. With the presidential election one day away, a carefully vetted ballot contains no outspoken reformists. Candidates have been instructed to be reticent and vague in televised debates. Campaign leaflets and posters are […]

Earth’s surface temperatures aren’t rising at the rate scientists predicted. It’s yet another example of how quickly our understanding of the Earth’s climate is changing, and a major blow to the green movement, which has aggressively pushed these predictions to get their preferred policies through. Now, even the New York Times is acknowledging this fact: The […]

An Evolving Hope That’s Here to Stayby Seyom Brown & Ronald E. NeumannR2P can be a prod for effective humanitarian intervention, but not a recipe suited to particular cases. Implementation can improve, but it will never be easy.A Feel Good Fallacyby Rajan MenonThe Responsibility to Protect concept is not flawed because it’s hard to implement; […]

Reports are emerging that Syrian rebels killed at least 60 Shiites in a village in eastern Syria in what seems to be a revenge attack for an earlier incident. The rebels say the Shiites were Shabiha, members of Assad’s feared irregular militias. Syrian officials describe it as a massacre of civilians. “What was not in […]

Countries in Asia are even more nervous about using big American tech companies like Google or Yahoo, thanks to the NSA’s leaked data collection program. Officials in Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Singapore once relied on mail services from Google and Yahoo to mail large attachments, but the Times of India reports that governments and businesses across […]

A new study by The Hamilton Project says that dropping out of college isn’t a total waste: you still get some benefit. The New York Times reports: The investment in even a partial college education is still worth it, amounting to average earnings of $100,000 more over a lifetime than for those who merely finish […]

The California “comeback” still hasn’t materialized, but a small specimen of good sense was finally spotted today. The WSJ reports that after much Democratic infighting over the state’s new surplus, Governor Jerry Brown may have just persuaded his fellow Dems in the state legislature to adopt a slightly more conservative budget that rejects attempts to spend […]

What is the biggest threat facing Britain’s banks? The euro crisis? Another economic downturn in the U.K.? Neither, according to Andrew Haldane, director of financial stability for the Bank of England. All five of Britain’s largest banks told him that hacking and other cyber attacks are their biggest concerns.Chinese cyber attacks on American corporations, research universities and […]