When the number of pre-made trip packages for sale on its site became scarce, the new online travel marketplace Vayable started offering customized travel experiences as a stopgap measure to boost its offerings. Forbes reports that they quickly found that the demand for custom trips was much greater than the demand for pre-made trips. Vayable has […]

China’s deteriorating environment is evident to anyone who lives under smoggy skies in Beijing, who saw the pigs floating downstream through central Shanghai, or who has ventured out to China’s rural farmland to talk to farmers about the polluted water used for drinking and irrigation. On his blog earlier this month, journalist Eric Fish argued […]

Though still traveling in India, WRM has a major essay in the Wall Street Journal on the comprehensive and compounding failure of Obama’s Middle East policies. Here’s a taste: The next problem is that the Obama administration misread the impact that its chosen strategies would have on relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia—and underestimated just how miserable those […]

Republicans’ no-holds-barred resistance to Obamacare continues unabated, as 80 Representatives are asking the House leadership to use the upcoming budget vote to defund the law. In a conference call with House Republicans, Speaker Boehner seemed to come out against risking a government shutdown over ACA funding, but hinted at using the upcoming debt-ceiling vote to stage […]

To outsiders it seems perverse: a country overthrows a deeply disliked military dictator, only to cheer on as the army overthrew his democratically-elected successor two years later, killing about 1,000 civilians in the process. How is it that Hosni Mubarak, that once deeply disliked dictator, was freed from prison yesterday without much public protest?The answer […]

Bo Xilai kept up a feisty defense as his trial, the prosecution of the highest-ranking Communist Party official in decades, continued for a second day on Friday. After a video interview with Bo’s wife was played in which she detailed the shady purchase of a villa in France (she then transferred her shares to the […]

California, which made big Obamacare headlines a few months ago for its misleading premium comparisons, is back with more bad news. It turns out that the state isn’t sure it will be able to launch its online insurance exchange by the October 1st deadline. WSJ: The spokesman said the agency is still doing checks, and […]

Reuters reports that many public pension funds are enjoying double-digit returns for fiscal year 2013. That’s considerably higher than the expected rate of return for public pensions, which often falls somewhere between 7 and 9 percent, and much higher than their recent returns, which have in many cases been in the low single digits. Although […]

Britain is the latest battleground where advocates  and opponents of fracking are arguing over the controversial method of extracting oil and gas from shale. The British Geological Survey doubled its estimates of the country’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves earlier this summer. Green activists have stalled exploratory drilling in the tiny village of Balcombe, prompting […]

Black smoke billowed above Tripoli, a large port city in northern Lebanon, this morning after explosions hit two mosques; early reports say that at least 27 people were killed and 400 wounded. The Taqwa and Salam mosques have hosted some of the most vitriolic of Lebanon’s Sunni preachers who have been criticizing Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group […]