New Jersey is quickly becoming the latest victim of the pension crisis. A new report from the State Budget Crisis Task Force estimates that pension costs will continue to increase beyond the state’s ability to pay, despite Governor Chris Christie’s reforms aimed at bringing pension costs in line. The New York Times reports: This year, the […]

One of Hugo Chávez’s longtime favorite stunts has been to threaten to halt oil exports to the U.S., disrupting America’s energy supply and roiling global energy markets. But these threats no longer carry much weight—not because of his ailing health but because the U.S. doesn’t rely heavily on Venezuelan oil anymore. According to estimates from the Financial Times, […]

Michigan Governor Rick Snyder has momentum on his side after last week’s big victory on right-to-work legislation, and now he has his sights set on another priority: Detroit. Earlier the city council repeatedly failed to pass a measure necessary to put the city’s ailing finances back on track. The bill finally passed Tuesday after weeks of negotiations, but Snyder has […]

The real battle for Egypt is against endemic poverty and the corruption of civil life from the highest levels of the state and the judiciary all the way down to the cop on the beat.The most important fact about Egyptian politics is that none of the parties now contending for power can win either of […]

For the first time in more than five decades, a Chinese plane has entered Japanese airspace near the disputed Senkaku Islands, the FT reports: Tokyo scrambled fighters and made a formal diplomatic protest after a Chinese maritime surveillance aeroplane was spotted in the territorial air space of the remote and uninhabited islands. . . .The […]

The NYT posted today the sixth and final chapter of an investigation into the rising costs of college. Today the focus is on the financial “geniuses” running American schools who have built fancy dormitories and high-tech facilities, saddling students with paying off the debt from the construction. A decade-long spending binge to build academic buildings, dormitories […]

There are more signs that the financial “phony war” in Europe is ending. Wolfgang Münchau at the FT writes: The Monti magic seemed to work for a while – much longer than I had expected. The yields on Italian 10-year bonds dropped about 200 basis points during his term because investors, desperate for good news, […]

Is Russia finally giving up on Assad? It certainly seems like it. The BBC has the story: [Russian Deputy Foreign Minister] Mr Bogdanov said on Thursday: “Unfortunately, we cannot rule out the victory of the Syrian opposition.”Mr Bogdanov repeated Russia’s call for dialogue between the two sides, predicting that the fighting would grow more intense.“If such […]

We’ve often had cause to content on the peculiar blindness that makes committed greens some of the worst policy wonks in the world: one high profile initiative after another blows up in highly embarrassing ways. Green policy is often marred by its obliviousness to political and economic realities—think comprehensive global treaties and ambitious carbon-trading schemes that always […]

If he were still alive, Saddam Hussein would probably be rolling in his spider hole to hear that Turkey is beginning to embrace Massoud Barzani’s Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq. This represents a reversal after years of support for Baghdad in their shared struggle against Kurdish separatist groups.Now Ankara and the KRG are discussing […]