Europe’s green policies have been an unmitigated disaster. The continent is having second thoughts on its misguided green policies, and it’s not hard to see why. By propping up uncompetitive solar and wind projects, Europe has driven prices up and driven energy-intensive industry away towards shale-flush America. By refusing to embrace the shale revolution, Europe has become […]

It’s an unusual scene: The Chinese government today welcomed South Korean President Park Geun-hye with a bouquet of flowers, an elaborate banquet, and the promise of a meeting with Xi Jinping. Across town, a “furtive, hastily arranged” meeting took place between Chinese officials and two North Koreans, a senior officer and a diplomat. The Norks, […]

After he started experiencing fainting spells in college, doctors told Eric Dishman that he had a confluence of rare diseases and that he would die in two years at the most. Refusing to accept this diagnosis, Dishman went looking for other opinions and treatments. Politico: Perhaps the most important step I took was having my genome sequenced. I’m lucky […]

The UK may have twice as much shale gas as previously thought, according to a new report. The British Geological Survey estimates that the UK may have 1,300 trillion cubic feet (Tcf) of shale gas, up from 623 Tcf in a previous EIA report. Even more encouraging, the British government released a slate of reforms […]

There are currently ten states whose pension liabilities are higher than total yearly revenues, according to a new Moody’s report on public pensions. The states in question included Colorado, Kentucky, New Jersey, Hawaii, and Connecticut. Worst of all was Illinois, where pension liabilities are more than twice as high as revenues. As Reuters reports, the culprit is the same […]

[This essay is part of a series that examines the five critical challenges America faces in our time. The first group of essays in the series looked at the problem of jobs as the economy transitions from an industrial to an information economy; the next group, which starts today, takes on the challenge of managing […]

A battle raging in France’s “pro-worker” legal system between an American multinational and a French labor union is sure to repel any Americans thinking of investing there in the future. The US tire company Goodyear has a factory in the northern French town of Amiens that is losing $80 million a year; it makes products […]

Burypensions Blog offers some skeptical scrutiny for Detroit’s recent rosy valuation of its Police and Fire Retirement System. The city claims the system is 96.1 percent funded, but the math shows that this may be so much lipstick on a pig. Among the five items Burypensions alleges the city is deliberately concealing: $552,110,000 of that asset amount […]

There are principles, and then there are economic interests—and they don’t always overlap. Germany has been doing its utmost to demonstrate that it has no illusions on this score by lobbying hard to prevent the EU from pushing through a set of lower CO2 emission standards.These new standards would stipulate that companies reduce their fleet-wide CO2 […]

Mohamed ElBaradei, a self-appointed leader of the regime counter-elite during Egypt’s Arab Spring, has just come out with a sharp critique of the Morsi government in Foreign Policy. In the years since Mubarak’s fall, Egypt has fallen to near the bottom of FP‘s Failed States Index, which ElBaradei chalks up to a lack of real reform and uncertainty […]