The Obama administration has made several changes to the Affordable Care Act during the implementation process, yielding to the concerns of different constituencies. But it has left one major special interest unappeased: labor. Union leaders want Obama to amend the ACA so that multi-employer union health plans qualify for subsidies. Right now, union plans don’t […]

Mexican President Peña Nieto’s education reform sailed through the Senate today, finally clearing the biggest hurdle to passage. The vote, a major victory for Peña, comes amid resistance from the country’s powerful teachers unions, who were dead set against the law and vowed to challenge it through a series of protests in the country’s capital. One of […]

Imagine you are the only child of two elderly, divorced parents who live in two different states, both of which are far from the state where you live. They ailing and need regular care, but you can’t afford to pay for home care or nursing homes for both of them. The cost of airfare and […]

Slogging your way to and from work every day makes for bad citizens, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Connecticut and Stony Brook University. Longer commutes drain the will to participate in politics (by, for example, voting, contacting one’s political representative, or working on campaigns). From the report (h/t Lukas […]

Russia and the EU have been waging a shadow war against each other’s economic union for quite awhile now, with Moscow’s Eurasian Customs Union on one side and the European Union free trade zone on the other. Moscow has had some trouble competing: so far, the only countries with Russia in the ECU are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan […]

Nebraska’s demolition of an old mall earlier this year could have been a story about the declining fortunes of malls in a digital age. Malls across the country have been abandoned or repurposed for schools or clinics in large part because online shopping offers more and better benefits for the consumer than the bricks-and-mortar retail experience. Demolishing or converting an […]

Are American schools trying to stamp out free thinkers? Elizabeth Weil raises this question in an excellent piece for The New Republic on the rise of “social and emotional learning” (or SEL), in which children are trained to avoid bad behavior and to keep an “internal monitor” on their own actions to keep their impulses in […]

Japan will increase military spending by 3 percent in the coming year, the defense minister said today; it’s the biggest increase in 22 years. “There are various tensions ongoing in Asia, and in some cases, there are countries that even use threats,” the AP reports the defense minister as saying.The top dangers facing Japan these days […]

It’s not just retiring Americans enjoying the benefits of expatriation; entrepreneurs are also finding that discount luxury living abroad can spur creativity. One company, Happy Hubs, is looking to combine the start-up incubation experience with resort life. Happy Hubs is launching a beta version of a workspace in Costa Rica, but plans to open up […]

A consensus is building that the ACA outreach may not be able to prepare people in time for the October 1st exchange launch. A new study by the insurance company Aflac finds that seven in ten workers haven’t heard anything from their companies about how the ACA will affect their benefits, while only 9 percent […]