Over the past few months, “green energy” companies subsidized by the federal government encountered financial difficulties, causing one company to file for bankruptcy. These failures have not deterred the Energy Department, however, which has just announced two new loan guarantees totaling over $400 million. The New York Times reports: The department will announce Thursday that […]

Violent attacks by Pakistan-based radical groups now have China in their sights.   From the Wall Street Journal: A militant Muslim group claimed by video it carried out recent attacks in western China that killed at least three dozen people, a monitoring group said.The video was purportedly made by the Turkistan Islamic Party, which seeks […]

The twelve members of President Obama’s supercommittee on deficit reduction are open for business. Do you have piles of cash and an interest in making sure that the “wrong” federal programs don’t get cut?  The cash windows are open, and operators are standing by. …at least nine members of the 12-member supercommittee…have scheduled fundraisers this […]

Ambassador Ryan Crocker is a no-nonsense guy. In an interview with the WSJ today, the new ambassador to Afghanistan said: “The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile.”Ambassador Crocker doesn’t put much faith in the current negotiations between US forces, Kabul, and the Taliban. Of Mullah Omar’s […]

From the Washington Post: The Obama administration escalated its crackdown on health-care fraud Wednesday, announcing charges against 91 people in eight cities who are accused of bilking the Medicare system out of nearly $300 million and victimizing the elderly and disabled people who rely on the federal insurance program…In Miami, 45 defendants — including a doctor and […]

The Great March of Bolivarian Revolutionary Progress is entering a rough patch. The two winds of leftist economic populism and aggressive environmentalism that have freshened the sails of Bolivia’s Evo Morales and Ecuador’s Rafael Correa have calmed, according to a report in the Financial Times: In his zeal to kick out foreign companies, Mr Morales’ […]

Iran-based hackers attacked a Dutch government site used by over half of Holland’s 17 million citizens, making off with codes used to steal personal information. As the Wall Street Journal reports: The Dutch government Tuesday sought to contain a hacking scandal officials believe originated in Iran…In July, [U.S.-owned, Netherlands-based DigiNotar] DigiNotar suffered the theft of […]

As regular readers know, I’m in Yaroslavl, Russia this week for the Russian government’s Global Social Forum.  It’s been a solemn time; yesterday a plane crashed at the local airport killing more than 40 people including the very well regarded and well liked local hockey team.  The facility hosting the conference is the hockey team’s […]

Tomorrow President Obama will stand before Congress and put forward a jobs plan. A real jobs plan? One that will work? One that learns from past mistakes? David Wessell, the WSJ‘s economics editor, thinks so: The package, fashioned over the past couple of weeks, draws from two lessons the president has learned in the past […]

A environmental theory that proposes a cause of global warming unrelated to greenhouse gasses is undergoing something of a renaissance at CERN, the world’s most important research facility for questions involving things that are very small and very fast. As the WSJ reports: [There is] another possible factor in climate change: charged subatomic particles from […]