Over the past decade, a massive, bipartisan education reform movement has been gaining momentum, bringing together governors, teachers, school counselors, multiple presidential administrations, and idealistic young college students. It is the force behind programs like No Child Left Behind and the Common Core Curriculum, as well as a number of charter school and voucher programs […]

At the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancún, delegates voted to set up a Green Climate Fund (GCF) to help poorer countries adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. The Fund would draw on the coffers of the developed world, which collectively pledged to raise $100 billion per year by 2020. […]

Different provisions of Obamacare has been delayed in many ways in the last several months, most notably the employer mandate. By putting off the implementation of some important but vexing parts of the law, the administration presumably hoped to make the launch as smooth as possible. Once the basic infrastructure of exchanges and subsidies was […]

Ed Miliband, leader of the UK’s opposition Labour Party, pledged this week to freeze British energy prices if elected in 2015. It’s one of the more obvious cases of a political party going for the grand pander rather than opting for a serious, well-thought out policy. The decision to intervene in the country’s energy markets—even […]

Putin’s been having a tough week in his backyard. First China began to push Russia out of Kazakhstan; now the EU is making a concerted effort to lure Ukraine away from Russia following Putin’s attempts to intimidate it into backing out of talks with the EU. The FT reports: The EU’s two most senior officials—José Manuel […]

Some people just don’t seem to understand how pensions work. Some of those people appear to have been running Detroit’s pension system for decades.In a report due today, Detroit’s auditor general and inspector general allege that the city pension has been making excess payments—things like bonuses to retirees and cash to families of workers who died before […]

America’s pension crisis is ugly, but it could be worse: consider China. The Chinese public is in an uproar over new academic research on pensions arguing among other things that the retirement age should be raised from 50 and 60 (for males and females, respectively) to 65.The problems this would address are all too real. Market Watch runs […]

To its credit, the Obama administration has at least recognized that the country is facing a massive student debt crisis. Unfortunately, most of its attempts to address the problem have missed the mark, and many are actually making things worse. Now the administration is trotting out a new plan: sending emails to people about to […]

The Department of Health and Human Services have just released the premium rates for all the federally run health care exchanges that will go live on October 1st in 36 states. It’s the single biggest info dump on ACA rates we’ve seen yet. What do these rates tell us? As per usual, they came with […]

Gazprom is proving for the umpteenth time that it’s willing to go to the mat with its natural gas customers. This time it’s Lithuania that is feeling the displeasure of Russia’s state-owned gas company, as Gazprom announced on Monday its intention to move forward with a plan to build a liquified natural gas (LNG) import […]