Not much meat is left on the bones of Detroit’s carcass, but leave it to finance to pick at what’s left. The WSJ reports that a handful of banks from Germany, Belgium, and Luxembourg that own $1 billion of bankrupt Detroit bonds will hold out in Michigan court to boost the price of their bonds […]

We’ve written before that critics of Obamacare shouldn’t put too much weight on early glitches and technical failures, but the problems may be even more extensive than we thought. Wonkblog states that reporters haven’t yet been able to locate a single person who has successfully signed up for coverage on the federal exchanges: This is not for […]

By the end of the year, the US will be producing more oil and gas than any other country in the world, displacing Russia, the former number one. That’s the finding of a new analysis conducted by the Wall Street Journal, highlighting the result of what has become a singularly American success story: the shale […]

In Belgium, death is more popular than ever. The BBC reports on Nathan Verhelst, a 44-year-old transsexual who recently opted to euthanize himself  after botched sex change operations. This case might seem like an outlier; the man in question clearly had psychological problems. But then you take a look at the overall numbers on the growth of euthanasia […]

A team of Italian scientists just released a meta-study that looks at more than 1,700 reports on genetically modified crops over the past decade; by and large, it gives the technology a clean bill of health. Real Clear Science reports: Led by Alessandro Nicolia, an applied biologist at the University of Perugia in Italy, the team collected […]

Whether and how people marry is as important to rising inequality as economic factors, and the media class is starting to realize it. The latest person to join the marriage-and-inequality camp is Derek Thompson, senior editor of The Atlantic’s business channel. His piece yesterday points to two social factors driving inequality: the rise of single parenthood among […]

Keeping up with its tit for tat policy, the State Department expelled three Venezuelan diplomats today. The move is reciprocation for the three US diplomats who were run out of Caracas on Monday on accusations of sabotage. But President Maduro’s face-saving gambit may not be so fruitful after all. The NYT has more: “The government […]

Yet another battle over pensions is raging, this time in Vallejo, CA, a city of 115,000. When Vallejo went bankrupt in 2008 with an $18 million deficit, its annual pension payments were $8.82 million (11 percent of the general fund). Since then it has laid off police and firefighters, slashed retiree health benefits, and cut […]

Many criticisms of the charter school movement are pretty unconvincing, coming from those with a large stake in the status quo. Charter schools are not an underhanded attempt to dismantle teachers unions and privatize the public education system. Others, however, are more difficult to dismiss. Most notably, many critics have pointed to the fact that charter […]

Brits will be paying dearly to heat their homes this winter, a fact that will increase scrutiny on the country’s domestic energy policies. Heating bills are already something of a political football—the opposition Labour party has an ill-conceived populist pander plan to freeze energy prices if elected in 2015. But supply disruptions in Norway, one […]