In light of yesterday’s underwhelming jobs report, we present the following two charts care of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (h/t Zero Hedge).Here’s the younger cohort broken out a bit more finely. Of the under-55 set, only the 25-34 age bracket has seen any kind of job growth since the start of 2009. And it’s […]

More than 200,000 retired Teamsters are now facing serious problems with their pensions. Central States Fund, a Teamsters pension plan founded by former union head Jimmy Hoffa, is only 60 percent funded and is now in “critical” status, as the WSJ reports. Despite efforts to make up the difference with big bets in the stock market, […]

Students, meet your robot professor. EdX, an educational consortium founded by Harvard and MIT we’ve written about before, has just released new software that grades student papers automatically. The NYT reports: The EdX assessment tool requires human teachers, or graders, to first grade 100 essays or essay questions. The system then uses a variety of […]

Republicans and Democrats finally agree on something: making health care more expensive for seniors. Currently, seniors who are insured through Medicare usually pay for some of their treatment out of their own pocket. But not all payments are the same. When their care is from a hospital, they pay one kind of deductible; when it […]

Hundreds of thousands of trainees are active in the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba, according to a new report by the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Many of those recruits are intelligent, secularly educated, driven young men, say the authors of the report, throwing cold water on the common assertion that most young men who join […]

Americans are flocking to “cram schools”, math test prep schools once primarily led and attended by Asian and Russian immigrants. The NYT reports: It’s no surprise to the average New York parent that so-called cram schools, once the cultural domain of Chinese-, Korean- and Russian-American students, have gained traction with non-Asian parents hoping to grab slots […]

It’s been a truly abysmal week for New York politics. Earlier this week, Democratic State Senator Malcolm Smith was accused of trying to rig the city’s mayoral election by bribing his way onto the GOP ballot. Now two New York State Assemblymen are being charged in another bribery racket to keep a Bronx senior center […]

Germans have a favorable impression of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s management of the Cyrpus crisis, according to a poll cited by the Washington Post, but the really important data is buried lower in the story. The same survey found that “75 percent of respondents believed the worst of the euro crisis is still to come.”European political leaders have […]

Drug kingpin Naw Kham was accustomed to a comfortable life on the lam in the “Golden Triangle”—the remote mountains and river valleys where Burma, Thailand, and Laos meet. He had a small army to protect his meth and heroin business and a network of locals and politicians who would tip him off if the authorities were […]