Japan is rather desperate for domestic energy sources these days. After shuttering its nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, the island country—largely bereft of oil and gas—has had to dramatically ramp up imports of liquified natural gas (LNG) to meet its energy needs, and is paying dearly for the privilege.But there’s good […]

For all the talk about the MOOC backlash setting in, the past few months have actually been an extremely fertile time for innovations in online learning, particularly when it comes to partnerships between MOOC purveyors and private companies. We’ve already discussed LinkedIn’s plans to create a “direct-to-profile” credential for completing courses, but as Forbes notes, this […]

After years of constant dithering and more failed deals than we’d care to count, lawmakers from both parties claim they’ve finally found the solution to Illinois’ worsening pension crisis. The deal, which was first announced last week, would require the state to contribute more to the state’s underfunded pension system, while at the same time […]

China claims not just the air and the sea off its coasts, but what lies underneath the water as well. In the past that has meant Beijing has laid claim to any deposits of oil and gas on the seafloor, as well as the fish in disputed waters off the coast; now it means shipwrecks […]

In November 2012, a study was published in Elsevier’s journal Food and Chemical Toxicology that purported to show that genetically modified corn produced tumors in rats. The report, led by French scientist Gilles-Eric Seralini, was controversial from the get-go. The EU’s food safety authority criticized the study’s methodology, and hundreds of scientists signed a petition requesting the […]

Puerto Rico is careening toward default, special bankruptcy, a backdoor bailout, or something else that will force a serious debt restructure on the troubled territory. That’s the lesson from an excellent piece in Forbes that explains how Puerto Rico has charted the course to blue model destruction. After much hemming and hawing the last ten […]

When Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio takes office on January 1, New York City’s charter schools are going to encounter some trouble. De Blasio has made it very clear that unlike his predecessor, his administration would like to stem the growth of charter schools, arguing that the city has as many as it needs. Specifically, he has […]

The recent Eastern Partnership saga, culminating with Ukraine’s decision to ditch the Association Agreement (AA) with Europe at the Vilnius EU summit on November 29, is a dramatic story with many plot twists. The moral of that story must still be learned if its disastrous repercussions are to be avoided.

President François Hollande is now the most unpopular French leader of the Fifth Republic. Opinion polls put his approval rating at just 21 percent. French citizens find his strict tax plans deeply upsetting and fear that his policies are weakening the economy and selling out the country to Brussels and Berlin. “Opinion poll after opinion poll […]

The Syria and Iran deals were evidently not what they seemed, unless you’d already become inured to this Administration’s amateur-hour grasp of policy process. In which case they were.