An article in Slate is throwing the brakes on the shale train. University of Chicago Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert is critical of bullish predictions of America’s bright energy future: [T]he days are long gone when you could stick a pitchfork in the ground and get a gusher that would produce for years. The new wells are expensive (on the order […]

Calpers, the largest public pension fund in the nation, sucks nearly $4 billion per year out of California’s state budget, but it’s still so desperate for cash that it has resorted to suing bankrupt cities.Steven Malanga at City Journal has an excellent piece describing how Calpers went from a prudent and responsible public pension fund to […]

Powerful weapons looted from Libyan stockpiles escaped the clutches of concerned NATO officials and found their way to conflicts across Africa and the Middle East, including Mali, where they bolstered the arsenal of radical Islamists and changed the course of the war. The NYT‘s indefatigable C.J. Chivers reports: The projectiles in question were NR-160s, antitank munitions […]

A billion overseas poor will soon get internet access, said outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, announcing a new State Department partnership with foundations and private companies. Bloomberg reports on the program: The public-private partnership among the State Department, the World Wide Web Foundation, and tech companies including Google Inc., Microsoft Corp., Yahoo! Inc., Intel Corp., and Cisco Systems […]

It seems like everyone is needling Japan these days. Two Russian Su-27 fighter jets flew through Japanese airspace near Hokkaido, Japan’s northernmost main island, for just over a minute yesterday.The Russian aerial incursion came on Northern Territory Day in Japan, which commemorates the 1855 treaty between the two countries that defines the South Kuril Islands […]

In this hyper-partisan age there’s at least one thing Americans seem to agree is good: killing terrorists without risking American lives. That’s the consensus from public opinion polls on the President’s use of drone strikes: A February 2012 Washington Post-ABC poll showed that eight in ten Americans (83 percent) approved of the Obama Administrations use […]

In one of the biggest national security stories in a long time, Leon Panetta revealed yesterday that the Pentagon and the State Department had backed arming the rebels in Syria last year. The White House wasn’t interested. That now looks increasingly like a historic mistake that increases the odds of the ultimate nightmare for the […]

Analysts are warning of major obstacles ahead for America’s ongoing energy revolution. Fracking has successfully opened up vast new reserves of oil and gas, but investors are concerned that ill-conceived regulations and stunted U.S. transportation infrastructure are threatening to slow the arrival of the energy boom. The Financial Times reports: Once the oil is extracted […]

Britain was rocked this week by one of the biggest scandals in the recent history of its health system—and it just might be a taste of things to come in the U.S.The scandal surrounds a recent hospital report’s findings that Stafford Hospital in Staffordshire ignored even the most basic standards of treatment to disastrous, and disgusting, […]

Rising oil and gas prices are hitting people hard enough, but now state legislators are raising gas taxes too, looking to find funds to repair aging transportation infrastructure: The infrastructure problems are especially severe among states in the Northeast but stretch across the entire nation, and they have been compounded by decades of underfunding and […]