Nearly a third of the world’s technically recoverable natural gas and 10 percent of its oil can be found in shale formations, according to a new report by the Energy Information Administration.  Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, there’s a bounty of oil and gas available to countries around the world .This report, which has a […]

North Korea canceled high-level talks with South Korea scheduled for later this week, apparently because the South’s choice of negotiator was for some reason unacceptable. “We consider the North Korean decision very regrettable,” said a South Korean government spokesman. They were to have been the highest-level talks in six years.Yesterday we noted that North Korea’s […]

Today’s Telegraph has an excerpt from a recent speech given in London by David Petraeus, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former director of the CIA. It is a sober and informative reflection on the Global War on Terror and what General Petraeus believes Britain and America’s duties are going forward. As […]

The euro crisis is so large, and its real world effects so tragic, that people often forget that the monetary mess is only one of many areas in which the EU isn’t working. Here’s a big one: Europe doesn’t have a security strategy and doesn’t want to talk about it. Judy Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe […]

Black men are more eager for long-term relationships (in most cases, this means marriage) than black women, according to a new study released jointly by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The results, which surprised the researchers, indicated that 43 percent of black men were inclined to say they wanted […]

Online classrooms may be the way of the future, but they aren’t very effective without a little old-fashioned face-to-face learning. That’s the finding of a new study from the journal Research & Practice in Assessment, which has conducted one of the first comprenesive studies of the functioning of MOOCs. The study combed through student data from MIT’s “Circuits […]

French President Francois Hollande is dealing with a pension system €14 billion in debt and a political base that is unwilling to do what it takes to stop the bleeding. Keen to avoid the union-mobilized protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets when Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 […]

The Nile actually runs through 11 countries, and therein lies Egypt’s problem. One of those countries, Ethiopia, is planning to dam the mighty Nile. The dam, which will eventually be Africa’s largest, is already under construction, and several days ago Ethiopia began diverting water from the Nile’s normal course. Downstream in Egypt, outrage is gaining […]

At Forbes, John Tamny takes issue with the notion of a higher ed bubble, claiming that it’s based on a misreading of what parents and students hope to get from a college education. If their goal were knowledge, he says, the bubble would have popped long ago; instead, they’re using a degree as a signifier of […]

At their much-hyped “shirtsleeves summit” this weekend, President Obama and President Xi made a deal to phase out the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), a particularly nasty greenhouse gas used as an industrial refrigerant. HFCs can be replaced relatively cheaply, and the framework for doing so is already in place, thanks to the Montreal Protocol, which got […]