Argentina’s pensioners are fighting the government to have their benefits adjusted for inflation, with little success so far. The government has been doing everything it can to avoid paying, and now some 450,000 individual cases are inching through an overloaded court system.Much of the problem is due to the government’s decision to use the pension […]

One of the world’s greatest killers is back on the loose. U.S. News reports on the spread of drug-resistant tuberculosis in South Africa: A new paper published earlier this week in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Emerging Infectious Diseases journal warns that the first cases of “totally drug-resistant” tuberculosis have been found in South Africa and that the disease is […]

A new movement is gaining steam in America: overseas retirement. Kiplinger, a personal finance and business forecast site, recently put out a list of eight great places to retire abroad. The attractions of these places are impressive. Bracketing off the one entry from Spain, the most expensive of the seven places was $2,700 per month […]

Xi Jinping takes over the reins of the Chinese government in one month, and many middle class Chinese hope he pursues a reformist path. But they’re likely to be disappointed. Though Xi has hinted publicly numerous times that he leans toward reform and opening, in private he is much more conservative, even rigidly so, swearing […]

A couple of years ago those who predicted radical changes to legal education were seen as crackpots. That might be starting to change. A panel at NYU Law School discussed the idea of having students take the bar after their second year. The proposal was well received: Many agreed that the third year is useful […]

China’s “Great Firewall” and generally poor IT infrastructure are keeping internet speed down and hurting businesses. The Wall Street Journal reports: Experts say the blocks that keep Chinese users from accessing services like Facebook, Twitter and Google Inc.’s online-video unit YouTube, are hurting businesses, slowing their traffic and hindering their use of a new generation of […]

The U.S. and the EU are now committed to drafting the long-awaited transatlantic free trade pact within the next two years. This idea has been kicking around in one form or another for years, but while a number of serious obstacles remain, both sides are in the mood to get something done quickly, as the FT […]

Obama may already be delivering on his promise to ease immigration restrictions for highly skilled entrepreneurs and engineers. A new bill is wending its way through Congress to do just that, as the WSJ reports: The Startup Act 3.0, a bipartisan Senate bill expected to be introduced this week, aims to get 75,000 new “entrepreneur visas” […]

Not even the Muslim Brotherhood trusts Hamas. In a surprise move yesterday, Egyptian forces blocked a network of tunnels that run between Egypt and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip by flooding them with water. The tunnels, used to smuggle everything from fuel to cement to weapons, are now inoperative. Imagine the global outcry if Israel did […]

Patients may soon get cheap, fast, and effective health care right from their desks, according to recent experiments with virtual doctor visits. A new report by Virtuwell clinic, a digital office of nurse practitioners created in Minnesota more than two years ago, finds that virtual visits were on average $88 cheaper than in-person visits and saved on average about […]