Florida Governor Rick Scott has signed a bill to expand the use of massively open online courseware in the state’s primary, secondary, and higher education systems. The law, which has been described as a slightly watered down version of an earlier bill, encourages public schools to use the courses as a teaching tool in certain […]

The Europeans are none too happy with President Obama. The German news magazine Der Spiegel broke news on Saturday that the NSA had bugged EU offices in Washington and New York, as well as a number of national embassies. The New York Times: According to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. installed listening devices in European Union diplomatic offices […]

Student loans interest rates just doubled this morning, as Congress left for recess after failing to reach a deal by the July 1 deadline. College students will now be forced to pay the government an additional $2,600 on average.There’s still a chance that lawmakers could pass a bill that would apply retroactively, saving students from […]

The shale boom has given the US a massive windfall of new natural gas and oil, and it’s happened very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that the infrastructure to bring these resources to market has struggled to keep up. In the past three years, Texas’s Eagle Ford shale formation went from producing nearly zero barrels […]

Jefferson County has officially filed its plan to end the largest municipal bankruptcy in the US to date (we’ll see what Detroit has to say about that record). The plan is precedent setting, says Bloomberg, in that in marks the first time US municipal debt holders have been forced to accept a loss of principal […]

With at least nine people dead in Egypt after massive protests demanding Mohamed Morsi’s ouster as President, a victor is emerging over the overreaching, incompetent, bigoted and undemocratic Islamist government. Hint: it’s not the idealistic liberals that the Western media continues to overwhelmingly focus on.The FT does some sentiment analysis from Cairo: The national mood concerning the army has […]

Sometimes an international event hits home. The death of Andrew Pochter, a 21 year old American college student who was stabbed to death during the protests in Alexandria, Egypt on Friday hit us hard at Via Meadia. By one of those coincidences that happen sometimes, not one but two of our staff writers, Jeremy Stern […]

In May, we previewed five critical challenges the US faces in the 21st century. A previous set of essays looked at the first of the five challenges—the problem of jobs as America transitions to an information economy. Now we’ve turned our attention to America’s demographic problem, the next of these challenges. How will we reimagine and […]

Just two days ago, China’s Foreign Minister was bristling at his neighbors, telling them that their claims on the South China Sea are “futile” and doomed to fail. Now, on the back of an apparently successful meeting with ASEAN nations in Brunei, the minister is singing a very different tune. Businessweek: “China and Asean countries […]

The benefits of telework are manifest: employers attract better workers and save money on office real estate, while employees get more flexible schedules and the ability to cut out the odious daily commute. The practice is catching on, with nearly one in ten Americans and one in five of the world’s workers working from home at […]