The last of the three major credit raters downgraded France on Friday, citing poor growth, rising unemployment, and projected public debt of 96 percent of GDP by next year. President François Hollande has responded by reluctantly promising to move ahead with austerity measures. The FT reports: There would be “less spending in 2014 than in 2013”, […]

China and India agreed to hold their first joint air and naval military exercises, and are “seeking to strengthen mutual trust between their armed forces,” the Times of India reported late last week. In 2007 and 2008 the two countries held joint army exercises but suspended them in 2009 over a diplomatic disagreement; this will be the […]

Spain is the latest European country to regret its foray into green energy production. On Friday the Spanish government announced some contentious reforms to its regime of green energy subsidies, which were among the most generous in Europe.Those subsidies (in the form of guaranteed above-market rates for producers) have been wildly successful at encouraging solar and wind […]

Men aren’t the only ones driving the hookup culture so prevalent across college campuses.  More than 60 women, all students at the University of Pennsylvania, granted anonymous interviews to The New York Times, and the resulting Style Section feature explores the sexual mores of some ambitious female students today: Ask her why she hasn’t had a […]

Vietnam and China should be friends. They share a 1,350 kilometer-long border and a similar socialist political culture married to a capitalist economy dominated by state-owned enterprises. Communist parties rule the roost in both Hanoi and Beijing; a strong police force keeps the population in line.But since 2009 the relationship has been cold and distant. In […]

A large, dusty pile of petroleum coke—a byproduct of oil-sands refining—is sitting on the banks of the Detroit River, and nearby residents are starting to suffer from it. The Detroit Free Press reports that pet coke dust, which is considered “low-toxicity,” is escaping into the air and making its way into people’s homes: “If it’s […]

Germany’s Energiewende, or “energy revolution,” has been heralded by greens as a shining example of the kind of true commitment to renewable energy that our planet requires, but in practice it’s been a flop. As the country phased out its nuclear reactors in the wake of the Fukushima disaster, it heavily subsidized wind and solar farms, passing […]

Here’s a depressing thought: maybe our default condition as humans is to be unhappy. Unemployment understandably breeds despondency, but the only thing we like less than working is lying sick in bed, according to a new study. Bill-paying, house-cleaning, queueing, and even dealing with the tedium of personal paperwork were all preferable to doing one’s […]

China is flexing its muscles in the Pacific, setting off new alarm bells in Tokyo. Following a week-long series of exercises with the Russian navy in the Sea of Japan, several Chinese warships took the provocative step of sailing through the La Pérouse Strait, the narrow body of water that separates Japan from Russia’s Sakhalin […]

The US shale boom has largely happened in North Dakota’s Bakken formation and southeast Texas’s Eagle Ford formation. But there’s another formation—previously the site of extensive conventional drilling—that could shift this revolution into a higher gear. Situated in northwest Texas and southeast New Mexico, the Permian basin has produced roughly 29 billion barrels of oil […]