Obamacare has entered a second—and possibly, much more serious—phase of glitches. The first two weeks were characterized by load and registration problems on the front end of the site. But even during that time there were hints that more serious problems were lurking in the background. Early on there were reports, for example, that some applications […]

Christians have been fleeing massacres and persecution in the Middle East for more than a hundred years; now the largest remaining Christian community in the region may soon join the rush. The AP reports on Egypt’s beleaguered Coptic Christians, who are struggling to protect their traditions, churches, art, and lives amidst rising anti-Christian violence: The […]

Last May I launched a series of blog posts on “the Big Five,” the five domestic problems that Americans have to address if the next few decades are going to go well. I planned to go on and write about them all, but after writing a couple of essays about the job crisis and another […]

The national press has started to latch on to a new abortion story: Molly Anne Dutton has just become the new homecoming queen of Auburn University, and she’s used her position to talk about her mother’s decision not to have an abortion. The Blaze: The 22-year-old’s biological mother was faced with an extremely difficult situation. The victim of […]

More data on ACA enrollment figures is slowly trickling out, and, despite some initial promise, things are not now looking great for the Obama administration’s enrollment goals. WaPo has a neat graphic looking at how the numbers broke down for the first week of traffic on the federal exchange site. While more than nine million […]

Last week, 20,600 barrels of oil sprayed across a North Dakota wheat farm, leaking from a rupture in a 6-inch diameter pipeline. Earlier this year a broken pipe spewed 5,000 barrels into a suburban Arkansas neighborhood. For environmentalists and oil executives alike, this is unacceptable. It’s bad for the environment, bad for business, and bad […]

An eye-opening study from the Walk Free Foundation has found that there are 29.8 million people living in slavery today. The non-profit organization, which released its first annual global slavery index earlier today, defined slavery as including human trafficking, forced labor or indebted servitude, forced marriage, and the sale or exploitation of children. Reuters reports: It found that […]

The Lord Voldemort war has escalated again, this time in Somalia. The UN-backed Somalian government is faltering under mounting pressure from Islamic insurgents, and now UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon says it needs thousands of additional troops to help it fight off the threat. The WaPo reports: In a letter to the U.N. Security Council, Ban urged […]

A Moody’s report confirms the worst fears of teachers’ unions: charter schools do, in fact, hurt traditional public schools. In a report examining the finances of Philadelphia’s school district, the credit rating agency found that the growing numbers of charter schools in the city are taking district resources from their traditional counterparts, hurting the finances […]

Talks are back on for a pipeline that would transport Russian gas to South Korea. South Korea already has a huge appetite for natural gas, and is getting even hungrier as it plans to nearly halve its nuclear power production. Russia is looking east to export its enormous energy reserves, having been rebuffed by a sluggish […]