Stockton, California has officially become the most populous city in America to file for bankruptcy. A judge ruled today that creditors did not negotiate in good faith with the insolvent city, making Stockton the first US city since the 1930s to use bankruptcy as protection against paying its debt in full. Bloomberg reports: Without bankruptcy […]

We’ve been known to sing the praises of telework on this blog, but it’s still, well…work. Coordinating projects and delegating responsibility is already difficult when everyone’s in the same place. How do you organize your workforce when your team is spread across multiple offices, cities, timezones, and even countries?Our team is divided between Washington, DC […]

Deng Yuwen shocked analysts of Asian geopolitics at the end of February when he penned a highly critical essay entitled “China should abandon North Korea” for the Financial Times. It was a shocker because Deng Yuwen is no liberal critic of China’s curious relationship with Pyongyang—he’s the deputy editor of the Study Times, a weekly magazine at […]

A small college in Missouri has come up with a surprisingly simple solution to the student loan crisis: it will no longer accept students who take out loans to pay for tuition. Instead, for the 90 percent of its students who require some form of financial aid, the college offers students a number of on-campus work opportunities. […]

A Saudi newspaper reported this morning that women will now be allowed to ride motorbikes and bicycles—well, sort of. The Times of Israel has the scoop: The Al-Yawm daily cited an unnamed official from the powerful religious police as saying women will be allowed to ride bikes in parks and recreational areas, but they must […]

Susan A. Patton, a 1977 Princeton alumna and one of the first women to attend the university, created a media firestorm last week by urging Princeton girls to lock down a husband while in college. She wrote in the Daily Princetonian, As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there […]

America’s renewable fuels program has been hit with a massive fraud case. A Texas man was ordered to pay $55 million in restitution and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison last Friday for selling nearly $42 million in fraudulent biofuel credits.Jeffrey David Gunselman took advantage of a weakness in the 2007 US Renewable […]

South Korea has vowed to shoot first and ask questions later if its forces are provoked by North Korea, as angry rhetoric on the Korean peninsula escalated dramatically today. “If there is any provocation…there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations,” President Park Geun-hye said on Monday. According to the FT, “Her comments suggest that […]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s the latest picture, derived from the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves database.The dollar was supposed to be doomed by the might of a single European currency, but the developing world’s central bankers are backing away. They have shed €45 billion from their holdings […]

Guess who else has shale oil? The FT has the answer: Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Lukoil, said Russia, the world’s second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, will be able to maintain crude output of 10m barrels a day for years to come as output from western Siberia’s Bazhenov Shale offsets declines in the country’s mature oilfields.It’s likely that Russian […]