The war in Syria just strayed into Iraq.Forty-eight Syrian soldiers were killed yesterday inside Iraq, in a well-coordinated ambush by gunmen whose identities remain unknown. Numerous reports say the soldiers were unarmed and many of them were wounded. They apparently crossed into Iraq near Yaarubiyeh to escape heavy fighting in northern Syria and were being […]

Student debt soared to nearly $1 trillion at the end of 2012, but young Americans now have the lowest levels of total debt that they have had for 15 years, according to the WSJ: A typical young U.S. household—defined as one led by someone under age 35—had $15,000 in total debt in 2010, down from […]

WRM has an op-ed in the WSJ on how al-Qaeda remains a serious threat to the US even after its failures in Iraq and the death of bin Laden: At this stage, the terrain favors America’s enemies. In places like the wide swath of Africa’s Sahel region, and in Yemen, Syria and Iraq, it is […]

Decades of incompetence and corruption in Detroit have led the city to the brink of the largest municipal bankruptcy in US history—yet the private sector is booming. Some might attribute this discrepancy to poor management on the part of the city government, but a recent piece in the NYT takes a different approach, bemoaning the plight of […]

Over at the New York Times, Erik Olsen reports on a new visual amplification process with lots of applications, including checking premature babies’ pulses without touching them: A 30-second video of a newborn baby shows the infant silently snoozing in its crib, his breathing barely perceptible. But when the video is run through an algorithm that […]

Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) lived up to its name on Sunday when nearly 5,000 party members unanimously voted to pave the way for key reforms to the country’s sluggish state-run energy industry. The FT reports: Institutional Revolutionary party (PRI) members convened for their national assembly agreed on Sunday to open the possibility of […]

Yesterday, Vice President Biden essentially threatened war with Iran. The US goal is “to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon, period, end of discussion. Prevent, not contain, prevent!” Biden snapped to resounding applause. “The President of the United States cannot, and does not, bluff. President Barack Obama is not bluffing,” he said.Biden’s speech at the annual AIPAC conference in […]

Gideon Rachman argues in his latest column that despite tough times in Europe the continent is electing comedians, not fascists, to power. There’s something to the trend he’s identified: it isn’t the 1930s anymore, and we aren’t seeing the rise of thugs and genocidaires (except maybe in Greece). Rachman: Italy’s regional separatists, the Northern League, […]

A green activist named Chen Yuqian claims to have been beaten by a group of forty thugs for “using the internet” to publicize pollution in the Zhejiang province where he lives. We reported on a Chinese entrepreneur’s $32,000 offer to a local environmental official to swim in a polluted river; emboldened by the creativity of this […]

Employers are increasingly disappointed by the graduates available for hire, according to a survey conducted by The Chronicle and American Public Media’s Marketplace: Half of those surveyed…said they had trouble finding recent graduates qualified to fill positions at their company or organization. Nearly a third gave colleges just fair to poor marks for producing successful employees. And […]