President Obama is in Mexico today, above all else to deepen economic ties. Mexico has come very far in a relatively short amount of time, and President Enrique Peña Nieto will greet President Obama with the reputation of a capable reformist determined to turn Mexico into the prosperous North American power it has long sought […]

Is Egypt on the brink of an even bigger catastrophe than has already befallen it? The FT has a story this morning about the unprecedented crime rates plaguing Egyptians of all walks of life: armed robberies are up twelvefold, car thefts are up fourfold, and homicides have tripled. The roots of the criminality are complex: […]

We commented before on Uber, the app that lets users quickly and easily hail cabs. After almost a year of delay, the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission finally agreed on Tuesday to start a pilot program for the app. Now the NYT reports that, on Wednesday, a judge from the appeals court issued an injunction that will once again […]

AirBnB, an app that allows people to rent out their homes, has recently announced that it will vet all potential renters to determine if they’re being honest about who they are. Pivoting off this announcement, a piece in the FT looks at the increasing push for identity verification online: It took Facebook to change everything. Suddenly it […]

College grads and young families, take note: the best place to start your life might be in a state you least expect. Those looking to start a business or launch a career might want to consult the Enterprise State Dashboard, a data survey put together by the US Chamber of Commerce. The interactive report ranks […]

Anecdotal observation tells us that working mothers often drop their careers when their work hours become too demanding. This theory has now been confirmed by a study led by Youngjoo Cha, an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University. Her research found that once average working hours exceed 50 hours a week, women with children […]

Argentines are now paying over nine pesos for every dollar on the country’s currency black market. La Nacion reports that rampant peso inflation and tight controls on the US dollar are pushing prices up on the “blue dollar” higher than it’s ever been. In this graph from the story, the red line is the price of the […]

A number of universities have been integrating online coursework into their programs in recent years. But Duke University has just pulled out of an online education consortium at the behest of its faculty, the New York Times reports: While [Duke provost Peter] Lange saw the consortium as expanding the courses available to Duke students, some […]

The shale bonanza just keeps on giving. The Williston Basin, one of the biggest sources of shale oil and gas in the US, has much more recoverable energy than previously estimated. This resource, located primarily in North Dakota (there are some fields in South Dakota, Montana and Canada), may have three times as much undiscovered […]

To attract business to her state, New Mexico Governor Susana Martinez (R) has taken a page from the playbooks of Governors Bobby Jindal and Sam Brownback: cutting the corporate income tax. While Governor Martinez has yet to follow Jindal and Brownback in their (unsuccessful) attempts to abolish the tax entirely, she clearly wants to join the […]