The US Senate appears to be on the verge of getting some sort immigration deal cobbled together. In a bid to attract Republican votes, the Dem-controlled body proposed adding to its bill provisions for greatly strengthening border security. Reuters reports that Harry Reid could test the vote as early as Monday, with a senior Democratic […]

Amid the fallout from the recent NSA revelations, the biggest tech firms have tried to present themselves as only reluctantly complying with the Feds. But as the New York Times reports, the truth is that Washington and Silicon Valley have had an increasingly close relationship for years now. “NSA badges are often seen on the lapels of […]

Israel has finally announced its intentions for its vast reserves of natural gas yesterday. The tiny country has been sitting on outsized reserves of offshore gas for years, but until yesterday had been vague about what it would do with this resource windfall. Israel will keep 60 percent of the gas for domestic use—enough, reportedly, […]

It was the shot heard around the office for unpaid interns. Last week a federal judge ruled against Fox Searchlight Pictures for violating labor laws by using unpaid interns on the film “Black Swan.” Two days later, two former New Yorker and W Magazine interns brought a suit against Condé Nast Publications for similar infractions. […]

“Those who have visited both Detroit and Hiroshima will have trouble guessing which country won that war.” So writes scholar of American politics Michael Barone in the latest issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Barone is a native of Detroit, where he once worked in the office of Mayor Jerome Cavanagh during the 1967 riots […]

A team of scientists from Harvard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has manufactured a battery the size of a grain of sand with a 3D printer. The group custom-built a 3D printer capable of manufacturing the new battery layer by layer, using filaments as thin as human hair. Harvard reports: In recent years engineers have […]

Patients who mismanage their medication cost the US $213 billion each year, according to a new study by the The IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics. This mismanagement includes underuse and overuse of medication, along with taking it inconsistently or at the wrong time. WaPo: The $213 billion equals nearly 8 percent of the more than $2.7 trillion the U.S. spent […]

An unlikely player has just entered the MOOC fray. On Wednesday, The IMF announced that it will join the online university network EdX, offering courses in financial policy and debt sustainability analysis. At the start, these courses will be open to government officials only, but by 2014 they will become accessible to the public at large. […]

The Nobel laureate and Harvard professor Amartya Sen penned an op-ed for the New York Times that in many ways is a useful discussion of the differences between India and China, the two giants of Asia, but which misses some important elements.In the first place, perhaps because he is writing to encourage Indian reform, Sen understates the […]

A new poll on American attitudes towards health insurance spells trouble for Obamacare, though that’s not how it’s being billed. According to the poll, 76 percent of all Americans aged 18-25 think insurance is worth its price, and 77 percent think it’s very important for them personally to have insurance. The Kaiser Foundation, which ran […]