Corn ethanol gets just about everything wrong: it increases emissions, it starves the world’s poor, it isn’t efficient, and it drains billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies. As it turns out, it might also be responsible for last year’s violent labor protests in South Africa and food protests in Haiti and Argentina. The story was […]

Germany is planning to cut many of its flagship green programs. Funding for these policies relies heavily on the sale of carbon emissions certificates under Europe’s cap-and-trade system, but the price of carbon in that system has flatlined. Der Spiegel reports: The budget for 2014 includes €2 billion for the Energy and Climate Fund to be […]

The British media is abuzz this week over the creation of a new government-run press regulator. The NYT reports that the new code invests the regulator with the authority to “order prominent corrections in publications that breach standards,” a power now enshrined in the royal charter, which also sets the rules for the BBC and the […]

A Philadelphia-based physician is being charged with seven counts of first-degree murder for performing late-term abortions. If convicted, he could face the death penalty: In opening statements in court on Monday, prosecutors charged that [Dr. Kermit Gosnell] who operated a women’s health clinic [in Philadelphia] killed seven viable fetuses by plunging scissors into their necks […]

Governor Jerry brown has trumpeted his state’s “comeback,” but the jobs data tells a different story. The Labor Department reports that California is tied for the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 9.8 percent. The alarmingly high figure is matched only by Rhode Island, another state dealing with the consequences of a stale blue model.Yet […]

Advocates of single-payer have long pointed to VA hospitals as examples of how a single-payer, government-run health care system can work in America. But this NYT story on a whistleblower’s letter complaining about a “pattern of problems” at one Mississippi VA hospital paints a much less appealing portrait of these institutions: The problems over the last […]

Fifty-eight percent of lower and middle class women now give birth to their first child outside of wedlock, according to a new report from the National Marriage Project. As the report notes, this statistic largely follows from the trend toward delayed marriage: Americans…are postponing marriage to their late twenties and thirties for two main reasons, one […]

The world’s top-selling producer of solar panels has defaulted on a $541 million bond payment. The Chinese firm Suntech hasn’t posted a profit since the first quarter of 2011 and has been relying on the government of Wuxi, the city where it is headquartered, to stay solvent. But as more bills come due, this renewable […]

How well do massively open online courses (MOOCs) actually work? We’ve come at this question from the perspective of students and researchers. What do the professors who actually teach these classes think?The Chronicle of Higher Education sent a short questionnaire to 184 professors who have taught a MOOC, asking them about the experience of teaching online, the differences between online classes […]

It looks like Cyprus is not going to march to the EU’s orders without putting up some kind of fight. A draft bill has been handed down to the Cypriot parliament which would exempt the smallest depositors from the proposed savings taxes. Brussels was blindsided, says the WSJ: European officials in Brussels were surprised by […]