Last week, 20,600 barrels of oil sprayed across a North Dakota wheat farm, leaking from a rupture in a 6-inch diameter pipeline. Earlier this year a broken pipe spewed 5,000 barrels into a suburban Arkansas neighborhood. For environmentalists and oil executives alike, this is unacceptable. It’s bad for the environment, bad for business, and bad […]

An eye-opening study from the Walk Free Foundation has found that there are 29.8 million people living in slavery today. The non-profit organization, which released its first annual global slavery index earlier today, defined slavery as including human trafficking, forced labor or indebted servitude, forced marriage, and the sale or exploitation of children. Reuters reports: It found that […]

The Lord Voldemort war has escalated again, this time in Somalia. The UN-backed Somalian government is faltering under mounting pressure from Islamic insurgents, and now UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says it needs thousands of additional troops to help it fight off the threat. The WaPo reports: In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, Ban urged […]

A Moody’s report confirms the worst fears of teachers’ unions: charter schools do, in fact, hurt traditional public schools. In a report examining the finances of Philadelphia’s school district, the credit rating agency found that the growing numbers of charter schools in the city are taking district resources from their traditional counterparts, hurting the finances […]

Talks are back on for a pipeline that would transport Russian gas to South Korea. South Korea already has a huge appetite for natural gas, and is getting even hungrier as it plans to nearly halve its nuclear power production. Russia is looking east to export its enormous energy reserves, having been rebuffed by a sluggish […]

From the northern edge of the Caspian Sea in Kazakhstan to the coast of Vietnam, with seemingly endless cash, diplomatic charm, and industrial resources, China is wooing countries in its neighborhood and beyond at a brisk pace. Beijing is buying gas, building pipelines, financing oil refineries, selling nuclear reactors, launching efforts to settle territorial disputes, […]

The shutdown is over, and the only Obamacare concession the GOP won is, at first glance, even less significant than the more modest items on their wish list going into this fight.The GOP won not a delay of the individual mandate, not the repeal of the medical device tax, not an agreement to strip congressional health […]

Here’s another really important story that the drama over the shutdown has been pushing to the sidelines. The Supreme Court is teeing up several potentially groundbreaking rulings. SCOTUS agreed this week to hear a case about whether or not the EPA has the power to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants and factories under the […]

America’s pension crisis has crossed the line from financial challenge to moral crisis. The chief evidence for that judgment is this Tennesseean article, which describes how pension obligation bonds are making a comeback.These bonds allow politicians in cities whose pensions are dangerously underfunded to shirk difficult decisions like raising taxes or cutting services; they do so, however, […]

Two hundred years ago this week, Napoleon’s forces battled those of the Sixth Coalition at the Battle of Leipzig, sometimes called the Battle of the Nations because soldiers from so many countries fought there. It was Napoleon’s first true defeat in battle and completed the work of the Russian campaign the year before. His mastery […]