Dilma Rouseff’s political future is increasingly coming into question. A new poll released yesterday shows a sharp deterioration in her popularity, with her economic team getting similarly dismal marks from frustrated voters. Reuters: The share of people who consider Rousseff’s administration “great” or “good” plummeted to 30 percent from 57 percent in early June, according to […]

President Obama announced a $7 billion aid package to sub-Saharan Africa today to increase the region’s access to electricity. He made the announcement in South Africa, part of a three nation tour of the continent that began in Senegal and will conclude in Tanzania. While this pledge, the cost of the trip, and Nelson Mandela’s deteriorating […]

A certain type of pundit has always been drawn to the idea that America’s best days are behind it. That tendency went viral in the commentariat after the global financial crisis, with chin-strokers around the world gravely intoning about the end of ‘Washington Consensus’ and the inexorable rise of Asia and the BRICs.American capitalism caused […]

NYC renters are hit every year with a huge tax they probably don’t even know about. Business Insider reports that homeowners pay a much lower property tax than landlords, making for a “property tax system [that] is a perverse cross-subsidy from relatively poor renters to relatively rich homeowners.” New York’s apartment properties are taxed at double the national […]

The past few years have been awful ones for government finances. It started when the public pension crisis began burning a hole in city and state budgets. It got worse when ratings agencies noticed, lowering the credit ratings of struggling states and making it much harder to borrow the money they need to keep services […]

 Is Egypt’s revolution falling apart? Clashes between anti-government protestors and Muslim Brotherhood supporters turned deadly yesterday, leaving at least three—including an American college student—dead. These clashes come ahead of massive country-wide demonstrations against President Morsi scheduled for Sunday. The NYT reports that on-the-ground forces are even speaking of a civil war: The use of firearms […]

Is Kevin Rudd the canary in a global coal mine?Last week, the Australian Labor Party leader scored one of the biggest victories of his career, unseating former Prime Minister and rival Julia Gillard and taking her spot as PM. But the real challenge for Mr. Rudd is only beginning, as he is taking power just […]

Drones that spray pesticide; special soil sensors linked to iPads; devices that detect crop contamination. These are just a few of the innovations wielded by a new Silicon Valley -Big Ag partnership that hopes to rationalize farming. The FT reports that a “coalition of top technology and agricultural firms” has created the Steinbeck Innovation Cluster to test out […]

Monoliths were first made famous in the sci-fi masterpiece 2001, A Space Odyssey, but now a different sort of monolith  could be moving from fiction to reality in the near future. Columbia University professor Peter Eisenberger hopes to use monoliths—a component similar to the catalytic convertor that cleans up a car’s exhaust—to pull carbon dioxide out […]

Boston’s mayoral election is fast approaching, and the autonomy of city schools has become a key issue in the race. The Boston Globe reports: [T]here is growing momentum behind a fundamental rethinking of urban education that some believe could provide the foundation to actually reach that goal.That rethinking is being driven by an idea that has […]