The California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS) has become notorious for poor investments and fleecing bankrupt cities, and now there are allegations of appalling in-house corruption.One of the main suspects is Alfred J. Villalobos, a former deputy Los Angeles mayor and CalPERS board member. A man ostensibly dedicated to such noble causes as serving the urban […]

It’s no secret that the recession caused states to cut back aid to public colleges. Now we know more about how deep those cuts really were. A study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that state spending per student on public colleges fell by 28 percent over the past five years and […]

Amazon has reportedly signed a 10-year, $600 million deal to build a cloud computing network for the CIA. It’s not yet clear what the CIA intends to do with this network, but it is likely an effort by the agency to stay current and secure in a world of accelerating technological change. As data moves from hard drives […]

Americans haven’t been saving enough money, and now the US has entered a retirement crisis the likes of which it has not seen for decades. The WSJ has some shocking statistics from a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute: Fifty-seven percent of U.S. workers surveyed reported less than $25,000 in total household savings and investments […]

Corn ethanol gets just about everything wrong: it increases emissions, it starves the world’s poor, it isn’t efficient, and it drains billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies. As it turns out, it might also be responsible for last year’s violent labor protests in South Africa and food protests in Haiti and Argentina. The story was […]

As President Obama heads off for his first visit to Israel, we are getting the usual flood of poll results indicating that Americans want a pro-Israel foreign policy. Meanwhile, the world continues to marvel at American support for the frequently isolated Jewish state. Why, people ask, does the United States incur such risks and costs […]

Germany is planning to cut many of its flagship green programs. Funding for these policies relies heavily on the sale of carbon emissions certificates under Europe’s cap-and-trade system, but the price of carbon in that system has flatlined. Der Spiegel reports: The budget for 2014 includes €2 billion for the Energy and Climate Fund to be […]

The British media is abuzz this week over the creation of a new government-run press regulator. The NYT reports that the new code invests the regulator with the authority to “order prominent corrections in publications that breach standards,” a power now enshrined in the royal charter, which also sets the rules for the BBC and the […]

A Philadelphia-based physician is being charged with seven counts of first-degree murder for performing late-term abortions. If convicted, he could face the death penalty: In opening statements in court on Monday, prosecutors charged that [Dr. Kermit Gosnell] who operated a women’s health clinic [in Philadelphia] killed seven viable fetuses by plunging scissors into their necks […]

Governor Jerry brown has trumpeted his state’s “comeback,” but the jobs data tells a different story. The Labor Department reports that California is tied for the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 9.8 percent. The alarmingly high figure is matched only by Rhode Island, another state dealing with the consequences of a stale blue model.Yet […]