Local governments across the country are cutting back on employee hours in anticipation of the Affordable Care Act. WaPo has a rundown of recent examples: Middletown Township, New Jersey is cutting back hours for 25 part-time workers; Bee County, Tex., is capping part-time hours at 24 per week; Brevard County, Fla., is pursuing similar policies. More: “It’s not […]

The shale revolution has largely been an American phenomenon. US geology is particularly suited to horizontal well drilling, and shale operations in countries like China and Australia have to contend with water scarcity. Europe’s shale has been blocked by the continent’s greens, and though the UK has made most of the region’s headlines recently for […]

Now that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing is official, the battle between Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and union leaders over the health of the city’s pensions has taken center stage. The key question is: How healthy are the city’s pensions, exactly? As we’ve seen before, it’s a difficult question to answer, as relatively minor-seeming changes in the […]

Even a well-designed law can have unintended effects that worsen the problems it was meant to solve—and a slipshod law like Obamacare threatens to cause serious damage. UPS, for instance, has decided to stop offering insurance to employee spouses who can get insurance from their own employer. The company cites the new costs imposed by Obamacare, […]

Earlier this week we wrote about Israel’s progress toward extracting its gas bounty, and noted that its next challenge will be figuring out how to get that gas to market. It has nearly 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that will likely find its way to Europe by pipeline, either underneath the Mediterranean or […]

In April we warned that dozens of cities in New York State were facing financial catastrophe stemming from underfunded pension liabilities. It turns out that we may have been lowballing it. Moody’s has just announced that the Long Island town of Huntington, NY could be downgraded for repeatedly delaying pension payments to fund short-term projects. […]

The price of carbon in California hit its lowest point this year at the most recent quarterly auction of emissions allowances. The price per metric ton of carbon was lower than expected, down 13 percent from the last auction in May. As Bloomberg reports, the low price was likely due to California’s stated plan to give […]

The college affordability plan President Obama has been touting all week was finally released this morning, and universities are already paying close attention. The core idea is relatively simple: Building on the “college scorecard” idea, in which colleges are publicly ranked on criteria including tuition costs, student loan debt, graduation rates and average income of […]

Reports of anti-Christian violence have been filtering out of Egypt for weeks now, but a new report by the Human Right’s Commission paints a comprehensive picture of the persecution. At least 37 churches have been burned or damaged, and survivors of some of the attacks have harrowing tales to tell: Another Dalga resident, Sameer Lamie, […]

Vestas is a Danish company that manufactures wind turbines, and it used to be the global leader in its industry. Things look much different at the company now, after its CEO was sacked on Wednesday in the face of plummeting profits and market share. Share prices are down 85 percent from this time five years […]