Bo Xilai’s trial, the prosecution of the highest-profile Chinese statesman in decades, started in China this morning. Onlookers were roundly surprised by Bo’s feisty defense and denials of wrongdoing: he claimed to have never received bribes from Xu Ming, a businessman who testified to providing Bo and his family with $3.3 million in exchange for help […]

While France’s foreign minister demanded that “a reaction of force must be taken” if it turns out Assad was behind yesterday’s chemical weapons attack in Damascus, Time is reporting that the tone coming out of the White House is decidedly… less decisive: “We are calling for this U.N. investigation to be conducted,” said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest. […]

Iran’s got a new oil minister, and he’s keen on ramping up the country’s oil production capacity and, eventually, its production. Bijan Zanganeh is seen as a much more technocratic appointee than his predecessor, and has a proven track record—he was Iran’s oil minister during the country’s so-called “golden age” of production in the late nineties […]

A new study released yesterday by the Kaiser foundation found that in 2013 health care premiums went up 4 percent for families and 5 percent for individuals. That’s down from the 10 percent increases we saw in the early aughts. Obamacare supporters have been quick to grab it as a political football, arguing that this data proves […]

We’ve devoted considerable space on this blog documenting the ways in which student debt prevents young people from beginning their lives as adults. A study from Demos, for example, finds that among college graduates, those without student debt are more likely to own a home and enjoy lower interest rates on their mortgages. But the effects […]

An internal Communist Party memo, seen by the New York Times and confirmed by at least four high ranking officials, underscores President Xi Jinping’s desire to shore up Party control over the state. Document #9 apparently describes seven “perils” that threaten the Party, according to the Times: The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting […]

Israel is already drilling for natural gas offshore in the Mediterranean, but in the coming years it is expected to ramp up production of the more than 40 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas in the region’s Levant basin. So is Cyprus, which discovered its own field in 2011 with an estimated 7 tcf of […]

Billionaire wildcatter Audrey McClendon, the co-founder and former CEO of oil and gas drilling giant Chesapeake Energy, is betting big on a new fracking front in Ohio. McClendon is hoping that southeast Ohio’s Utica shale formation will prove to be as profitable as North Dakota’s Bakken formation or Texas’s Barnett shale. The WSJ reports: Mr. McClendon’s deal-making […]

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has been a vocal supporter of Obamacare, but in his latest piece he stops just short of calling Obama’s recent remarks on rate spikes a lie. The piece, entitled “Obama Made a Misleading Statement About Obamacare Rates,” considers Obama’s claim that those currently uninsured will get “significantly cheaper” insurance rates under the […]

Blue states like California and Illinois are  struggling meeting obligations for their own public pension funds, so they certainly don’t need this latest bit of news—their tax bases are shrinking drastically. A new study on state-by-state income migration from the Tax Foundation (h/t WSJ), found that New York, California, and Illinois—the largest blue states in […]