Chicago has the highest pension burden in the nation, with liabilities amounting to an alarming 678 percent of revenues, according to a report by Moody’s. The ratings agency’s warning, coupled with the fact that the city will need to drastically increase pension contributions by 2015, has prompted Mayor Rahm Emanuel to try to buy some time. […]

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a draft summary early tomorrow morning that aims to encapsulate our current understanding of climate and our relationship with it. Greens, policymakers, and green policymakers all over the world will be paying close attention to this summary, because it represents the clearest communication from the scientific […]

Bill Gates has dedicated his post-Microsoft life to humanitarian work—the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation has directed billions of dollars toward health and development programs around the world. But Gates sees energy reform as the quickest path toward reducing poverty, saying in a 2010 TED speech that “if you could pick just one thing to lower […]

If you could retire for 40 dollars a day, would you? A BBC piece today suggest that British citizens are increasingly answering in the affirmative: With the low cost of medicine, English-speaking retirement communities and affordable housing, many are heading to tropical destinations, including South America and Southeast Asia where it’s doable to live on […]

Over the past decade, a massive, bipartisan education reform movement has been gaining momentum, bringing together governors, teachers, school counselors, multiple presidential administrations, and idealistic young college students. It is the force behind programs like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Curriculum, as well as a number of charter school and voucher programs […]

At the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, delegates voted to set up a Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help poorer countries adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. The Fund would draw on the coffers of the developed world, which collectively pledged to raise $100 billion per year by 2020. […]

Different provisions of Obamacare has been delayed in many ways in the last several months, most notably the employer mandate. By putting off the implementation of some important but vexing parts of the law, the administration presumably hoped to make the launch as smooth as possible. Once the basic infrastructure of exchanges and subsidies was […]

Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s opposition Labour Party, pledged this week to freeze British energy prices if elected in 2015. It’s one of the more obvious cases of a political party going for the grand pander rather than opting for a serious, well-thought out policy. The decision to intervene in the country’s energy markets—even […]

Putin’s been having a tough week in his backyard. First China began to push Russia out of Kazakhstan; now the EU is making a concerted effort to lure Ukraine away from Russia following Putin’s attempts to intimidate it into backing out of talks with the EU. The FT reports: The EU’s two most senior officials—José Manuel […]

Some people just don’t seem to understand how pensions work. Some of those people appear to have been running Detroit’s pension system for decades.In a report due today, Detroit’s auditor general and inspector general allege that the city pension has been making excess payments—things like bonuses to retirees and cash to families of workers who died before […]