A lot of politicians around the world would probably enjoy doing this: if a pollster is reporting that your popularity is sinking, you sic the prosecutors onto the pollsters.That’s just what Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been doing. Brandishing a new law designed to stain the reputation of NGOs by forcing them to register as agents […]

Iran’s Foreign Minister, of all people, has warned the world that bedlam and chaos will sweep the Middle East if the Syrian rebels defeat the forces of Butcher Assad.So, if we understand that correctly, Iran’s line on the Middle East seems to be: “any attempt to interfere in our systematic program of regional destabilization will […]

This year’s crop of college grads will be entering one of the toughest job markets the country has seen in years. Some of this is a natural result of the recession, but as Zero Hedge points out, much of it is due to structural changes in the economy that have made college degrees less valuable than in […]

Insider trading may be one of the most difficult areas of finance to regulate, but it’s also one of the most important. The Washington Post has a report explaining why: The Stock Act, passed last year but watered down last month, requires that government officials, congressmen and their staffers treat certain information as confidential without […]

News that spending on health care has slowed down has been making the rounds over the past few weeks. This is a big deal, given our recent history with out of control health care costs, but the story within the story may be even more important: the reduced health care spending isn’t solely due to the […]

Officials and politicians in cash-strapped cities need to start being careful what they say. Two months after the SEC slapped Illinois with fraud charges for making misleading statements about its finances, it is doing the same to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, which has been fighting bankruptcy after racking up $350 million debts to fix an incinerator.The SEC is taking issue […]

The NYT published a news piece today on the Affordable Care Act that accuses Republicans of “preparing to exploit every problem that arises” with Obamacare in the next midterm elections. The most telling part of the piece comes at the end. After heaping scorn on Republican opportunism, the author delves into what Obama will need […]

North Korea moved two long-range missiles off the launchpad yesterday, a clear sign that the Norks will not go ahead with the rocket test that has kept the US, Japan, South Korea, and much of world media on edge over the past few weeks.Another piece of news is equally significant: the Bank of China stopped […]

The Pentagon directly accused China of various cyber crimes against the United States in its annual report released yesterday, a significant escalation from the administration’s previous policy of merely suggesting that much of the world’s cyber espionage originates in China. The New York Times has the details: While some recent estimates have more than 90 percent of […]

The last time we wrote about SolarCity, the company was under federal investigation for possibly grifting the government. Now the country’s largest installer of residential solar panels is suing the federal government for supposedly failing to cough up grant money promised in 2009. The Wall Street Journal reports: [C]ash grants created by the federal stimulus law…are based […]