When Showa, a Japanese company that supplies precision parts to companies like Toyota and Nintendo, went looking for a site for its first overseas factory, China was the obvious first choice. Many of Showa’s customers have factories there and it is the biggest market in the region. But in the end the company’s president chose […]

The day of reckoning has finally arrived for a number of short-haul Amtrak routes in the American heartland. After years of delivering subsidies for low-ridership routes connecting cities like Chicago and Indianapolis or Oklahoma City and Dallas, the federal money train is about to make its final stop, leaving the states to pick up the […]

China continues to build its naval fleet as tensions rise in South and East Asia. This is good news for the China Shipbuilding Industry Co., a state-run military contractor and the nation’s largest shipbuilder. The company announced plans to accept $1.4 billion in private investment, which will fund the building of larger, more threatening warships. From […]

Republicans are no doubt popping champagne corks all across the country in light of some impressive new poll numbers about public perception of the GOP. The WSJ reports: Republicans are now rated higher than Democrats on handling the economy and foreign policy, and the GOP’s lead has strengthened on several other issues, including dealing with […]

President Obama is not a stupid man. After more than four years in the White House, he cannot be called a naive man or an inexperienced leader. He is not, despite the suspicions of some of his angrier critics, actively seeking to undermine the prestige and the power of the United States. So why has […]

We’re about to see a lot more cancer. According to a new report by the Institute of Medicine, by the year 2030 2.6 million more Americans will get cancer every year, a 45 percent increase over current rates. That along would be cause for serious concern, but when you add our poor cancer care standards […]

Every time we think we’ve reached rock bottom in the pension crisis, a new piece of data comes along to let us know there’s still further to fall. As reported by Reuters, a recent Moody’s study contains several disturbing facts: the 61 most populous US cities are together facing a $99 billion shortfall in pension funds, […]

The latest in MOOC innovation is a two-part class offered by Coursera on app development. Unlike most MOOCs, however, each part of this sequence is taught by a professor from a different university (University of Maryland and Vanderbilt, respectively).Vanderbilt news: “Creating such an opportunity for Vanderbilt and University of Maryland students alone would be incredibly […]

The UK’s National Health System has been at the center of several PR disasters this year, but new data suggests that the scandals aren’t isolated incidents. The Telegraph reports on new findings that patients in UK hospitals are 45 percent more likely to die than patients in the US, and five times more likely to die from […]

“If the wars of this century were fought over oil,” a vice president of the World Bank famously warned in 1995, “the wars of the next century will be fought over water—unless we change our approach to managing this precious and vital resource.” Water scarcity and its ability to create domestic unrest and international conflict […]