In India today, there are two competing images of Narendra Modi, the star player of India’s most powerful opposition party, the Hindu nationalist BJP. One is Modi the Muslim-hater, the man who was in charge when religious violence, inflamed by some of Modi’s close aides, swept across Gujarat in 2002. More than a thousand people, most […]

Over the past few years, the college cost crisis has evolved from merely an important issue facing parents and students into a serious national problem that could impact the future of the country. Moreover, most government programs designed to address the problem have only made it worse, inflating the bubble by encouraging students to borrow […]

The 23 biggest “tight” oilfields—the kind of plays that require fracking—outside the US and Canada contain more than four times the oil found in North American tight oilfields. The FT reports on a new study: Analysis by IHS published on Tuesday morning suggests fields including the Vaca Muerta of Argentine, the Bazhenov shale of Siberia and the Silurian […]

Unfortunately for pensioners, reports of their retirement security have been greatly exaggerated. The Economist calculates the 10-year return on an average diversified portfolio to be a mere 2.7 percent. That’s the fourth-lowest level since 1871. This estimation comes to the chagrin of any investor, but for government pension-holders and fund managers it is much grimmer.In nominal terms, the […]

Connie Hedegaard doesn’t need science to tell her that Europe’s green policy is on the right track. She’s the EU’s Climate Commissioner, and she has discarded science, the oft-donned mantle of green policymakers around the world. In an interview with the Telegraph, she said, “Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, […]

A line in Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” goes, “Twenty years of schoolin’ / And they put you on the day shift.” It was written in 1965, but would probably resonate with today’s college graduates who are stuck working part-time in menial jobs.On top of massive student loan debt, many recent college graduates now enter a […]

The Euro crisis no longer seems quite as desperate as it did this time last year, but the relative calm hasn’t convinced Europeans that all will be well. A new poll from the French paper La Croix found that more than half of respondents in a number of Europe’s largest countries believe that their countries could be […]

It didn’t take long for Cristina de Kirchner’s foreign exchange controls and phony inflation numbers to make black markets a staple of life in Argentina. The FT reports that Buenos Aires today is littered with “caves”—shady offices where dollars can be bought and sold for double the official rate: In the heart of downtown Buenos […]

For a brief week it looked like talks between the Pakistani government and the Pakistani Taliban were getting somewhere. The top military leadership blessed an initiative, led by Nawaz Sharif, to talk to the militant group that has waged a bloody war against the Pakistani government for years. But then the Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility […]

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: shale gas is fracking green. A new study confirms that natural gas helps decrease greenhouse gas emissions by displacing the much dirtier and more carbon intensive coal.The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, and it pokes a hole in one […]