The CEO of Gazprom, Russia’s state-owned gas monopoly, doesn’t think much of the shale boom. In a recent interview with RT, he seemed downright dismissive of the new supply of natural gas, insisting that Russia won’t need to pursue unconventional gas reserves (read: shale) until next century.The interviewer asked CEO Aleksandr Medvedev about Gazprom’s relationship with […]

Political scientists are the next in line to feel the pinch as the US government tightens its belt. Due to last-minute language added to the 2013 omnibus spending bill by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the National Science Foundation canceled the rest of its funding for political science for the rest of the year.Political scientists […]

One of the most difficult challenges facing China on its road to superpowerdom is its looming demographic cliff. If China’s population crests in 2020 as some are predicting, the retiree-to-worker ratio will get more lopsided in every subsequent decade, putting enormous strains on China’s public finances and pension schemes. Chinese Party officials, central planning technocrats […]

If you dream of never paying another traffic ticket for the rest of your life, become a government employee in California. The OC Register reports that, thanks to a long obsolete program, hundreds of thousands of drivers in California can run red lights, drive down toll lanes without paying, and park illegally—with total impunity.Those drivers […]

The Egyptian army is taking every opportunity to twist the screws on the Muslim Brotherhood. By going through with the trial of its most senior leaders on charges that they incited supporters to the murder of three people during the events surrounding Mohamed Morsi’s ouster, Egypt’s military leaders are hoping to pressure the Brotherhood to […]

The Chinese Foreign Minister said on Monday that China is in no hurry to solve territorial disputes with its neighbors. For years ASEAN countries have sought to jointly negotiate with Beijing to establish a Code of Conduct (CoC) for civilian and military operations in territorial waters claimed by several countries, but China has resisted. Even […]

We chose to take a step back and review the Obama administration’s foreign policy in the Middle East in this week’s essay: We’ve said from the beginning that the Arab Spring was going to present the administration with some horrible headaches and impossible choices. George Washington was the first US President to learn just how […]

A new report out last week in the journal Environmental Research Letters finds that it is theoretically possible to not only feed the world’s current population with current crops and agricultural technology—we could potentially feed 4 billion more. Malthusians have been warning that humans have charted a course towards apocalypse as we grow beyond the […]

In the current issue of National Review, Avik Roy has an excellent piece on the perverse effects of hospital consolidation. Unfortunately the article is behind a paywall, but he gets right to the nub of the problem in the opening paragraphs: In 1994, two eminent Boston hospitals, Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, […]

The most compelling cause for worry regarding the data that the NSA is collecting on people’s online activities was that it could end up being used in cases that are strictly outside the scope of anti-terrorism. According to the New York Times, other government agencies are trying to get at the NSA’s vast data stores […]