Rhode Island has seen better days. With a massive pension crisis, a long battle between the state government and its unions, and one of the highest unemployment rates in the country, the Ocean State is struggling to recover from the worst crisis it has seen in decades. Fortunately the state is actively looking for ways to […]

In at least one respect, the ACA completely reverses the status quo of the insurance industry: under Obamacare, the riskier patients pay less. The WSJ breaks down the numbers, showing that younger, healthier patients will end up paying more for insurance than older ones, like 62 year old Robert Wengrow. To us, this looks like a […]

Germany’s “green revolution,” or energiewende, was supposed to be a proof-of-concept for renewable energy policy. The green movement, for its part, holds Germany up as a successful example of how much can be accomplished—how many gigawatts of solar and wind energy capacity can be installed—if governments just ditch dirty fossil fuels and get on the […]

The world’s eyes are riveted on Syria this week, as the United States, France and perhaps a few others organize plans to punish a bloodstained government for its use of chemical weapons against its own people. It’s a story that has everything: the prospect of violence, the political agony of an embattled White House, David […]

India’s GDP growth for the April to June quarter was a dismal 4.4 percent, the government said today. It was the slowest rate of growth since 2009. “It was a weaker performance than most economists had been expecting,” the BBC reports, “and was a slowdown from the first three months of the year, when growth was […]

It’s easy to get carried away with the new optimism over America’s energy future as it rides a wave of shale oil and gas production. We’re now imagining a world in which the US is a net oil exporter, which would have been unimaginable just ten years ago. Having more oil and gas isn’t just […]

Ever since Obama called for “limited” strikes against Syria earlier this week, one question has trumped all others: What, exactly, is the purpose of this mission? To help answer that question, a new piece in the NYT sheds some light on the administration’s goals: The goal of the cruise missile strikes the United States is […]

A few days before India unveiled its first home-built aircraft carrier (and so far Asia’s only one), grainy images posted online appeared to show the unfinished hull of another Asia-made carrier at a shipyard in China. There has been no official confirmation that this is what the pictures actually show, but today a Chinese defense ministry […]

This past January, San Jose State University excitedly announced a partnership with the MOOC start-up Udacity, only to find itself wiping some egg off its face after the first semester of online offerings went poorly, with less than half of the students passing the end-of-semester exam. The university put the program on hold, and MOOC […]

The SEC is investigating JP Morgan for bribery over reports that the company has been giving jobs to the children of powerful officials in order to win business in China. A recent examination of the company’s “Sons and Daughters” program, which was designed to prevent nepotism, found that the program instead did the opposite, providing […]