U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta’s visit to China appears to have resulted in a minor diplomatic thaw between the two countries. China’s leader-in-waiting, Xi Jinping, who earlier went AWOL during Hillary Clinton’s visit, re-emerged out of temporary obscurity to meet and chat with Panetta. As Voice of America reports, Panetta showed China’s military leadership […]

The Chicago teachers’ strike and the coming pension crisis has even progressives worried that public-sector employee costs are bankrupting the city: Matt Yglesias is arguing that the teachers’ union’s proposal to raise taxes to pay for their pension programs may divert funds from more important programs: …[T]he city of Chicago most certainly can run out of […]

If you can make it in New York, you really can make it anywhere, because the Big Apple certainly doesn’t make it easy. New census information shows that the city’s poverty rate has reached its highest point in more than a decade. In the capital of Blue America, the rich are growing richer while the poor […]

Online education has made astonishing strides in recent months. In the past year alone, projects like EdX, Udacity and Coursera have gone from hypotheticals to live programs. But the latter appears to be pulling ahead of its competitors: How is [Coursera] growing so fast? By leaving all the labor-intensive parts of online education—the teaching, the curriculum […]

A manufacturing revolution is underway in Mexico, the FT reports: For the first time in a decade, Latin America’s second-largest economy has become a credible competitor to China.During the first half of this year, Mexico accounted for 14.2 per cent of manufactured imports into the US, the world’s largest importer. In 2005, Mexico’s share was […]

The powers-that-be in the U.S. Postal Service have come up with a genius plan to keep the system afloat: Bury us in junk mail. Facing a decline in normal mail volume, post offices are looking to convince businesses to flood our mailboxes. The New York Times reports: Faced with multibillion-dollar losses and significant declines in […]

Is Burma the next Asian Tiger? Jared Bissinger, writing at Foreign Policy, doesn’t think so. He lists seven myths about Burma’s economy and the recent reforms, concluding that all is not as rosy as the Burmese government and more than a few international businessmen might lead you to believe: The economies of the Asian Tigers don’t look […]

Chicago’s teachers weren’t the only ones to end a strike this week: South Africa’s six-week mine protest finally came to an end on Tuesday when a group of protesting miners were promised a pay raise. And much like in America, the resolution of these strikes gives an embattled president new hope for reelection.Unfortunately, this isn’t […]

The strike may be over, but the problems for Chicago’s teachers are only beginning. The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund will go bankrupt in a few years if nothing is done. The New York Times reports: The Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund has about $10 billion in assets, but is paying out more than $1 billion in benefits a […]

At the beginning of the euro crisis, many predicted Europe would be pushed into a closer union. Instead, the opposite seems to be happening: Europe is slowly fragmenting into a two-tiered structure with a safe, reliable core and a dangerous, floundering periphery. As depositors rush to withdraw their money from peripheral banks and put it […]