The Syrian peace process had only just begun before it was delayed: “We were hoping that we’d be in a position to announce a date today, unfortunately we’re not,” [special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi] told reporters. “But we’re still hoping that we’ll be able to have the conference before the end of the year.”The envoy added that “nothing […]

Conflicts over language have occurred periodically all through history—command of sacred languages marking priestly hierarchies, languages of conquerors imposed upon or submissively adopted by the conquered, language as symbolizing class differences. Even today language is at the center of important political conflicts: between Catalan and Castilian in Spain, Flemish and French in Belgium, in campaigns […]

Green policies are increasingly a luxury that only the rich can afford, yet seem to be living halcyon days in places like Europe and California. The ever-insightful Joel Kotkin writes of the ascendancy of the green gentry pushing these ideas, and the class warfare they’re currently waging in his home state of California: The environmental movement […]

Over at Forbes, Tomas Philipson notes that with or without Obamacare, US health care costs will still skyrocket over the coming decades. Health care liabilities will continue to push federal deficits far over tax revenues, and private spending will rise similarly. What’s causing this? Philipson has an answer: Surprisingly, the health policy community largely agrees […]

Saving for retirement is probably the last thing debt-burdened college grads want to think about, but unfortunately they may have to start sooner than they think. According to a new study, many Millennials may not be able to retire comfortably until age 73 due to their college debt. Essentially, the problem is that while students are […]

A recent lawsuit settlement in Northern California could be a major turning point in the fight for price transparency in health care. Sutter Health is a hospital chain that runs 24 hospitals throughout the region. As the LA Times reports, a billing auditing company sued the chain for double-charging patients for anesthesia, and now, right before the […]

Heavy fighting between warring militias and the government has erupted in Tripoli, the capital of Libya. The country is slowly slipping back into civil war. Assassinations and bombings occur on an almost daily basis in Benghazi, the coastal city in eastern Libya, and now Tripoli, which for a while hadn’t seen the worst of the […]

In an astounding feat of government sclerosis, the legislature facing the deepest deficit and lowest credit rating of any US state is set to punt yet again on the source of its misery: public pensions. Governor Pat Quinn began the year with a demand that the legislature do something, anything, about the state’s $173 billion pension […]

So many European countries are getting energy policy wrong that even the green-minded EU is calling for change. The European Commission urged the EU’s member countries to be more judicious when intervening in energy markets, after overzealous green subsidies have sent energy prices into the stratosphere.Germany is often held up by environmentalists as proof that renewable […]

As the Chronicle of Higher Education reports, schools that offer MOOCs are getting nervous about how much power they’ve handed over to the private companies that host their courses. Stanford is among them: Why? “There are people who are uncomfortable for a range of reasons,” says Jane Manning, director of platforms for Stanford Online, the university’s new […]