One of the biggest challenges facing Obamacare is adverse selection, which occurs when healthy people drop out of the insurance pool, leaving only the sick and the old behind. We’ve always known Obamacare needed to enroll a large number of new patients to avoid adverse selection and make the law work. Now we know what number […]

First there was an agreement over naval facilities. Now Cyprus may “facilitate” the Russian Air Force at its Andreas Papandreou Airbase. And that’s not all, reports the Famagusta Gazette: [Defense Minister Photis Photiou] said moreover that the possibility of providing the airbase in Pafos, in certain cases, has been discussed during his recent visit to Moscow, both with […]

Last week, Chinese workers at Specialty Medical Supplies just outside Beijing kidnapped the co-owner of the factory, an American named Chip Starnes. Barricaded in his office for several days, Starnes says he was coerced into giving “severance packages” to a hundred workers by local party officials, even though those workers weren’t going to be laid off.The trouble […]

Tomorrow President Obama will give a speech outlining a handful of green initiatives that will shape the environmental legacy of his presidency. But in the run up to the speech, we’re seeing more signs of a renewables debate whose tone has turned somber since Obama’s first term. There hasn’t been much in the way of good news for green […]

It appears that Putin is no longer content with just kicking sand in John Kerry’s face. With NSA leaker Edward Snowden in hand, Moscow is now giving wedgies and making the Obama administration eat bugs.Today, “exasperated” Obama administration officials urged Russia to expel Snowden, the New York Times reports. “We do expect the Russian government to […]

The Turkish protests have lasted for almost a month now, but one group has yet to check into Taksim Square so far. The Kurds, who make up almost 20 percent of Turkey’s population and are usually at the forefront of any anti-government protest, have been a no show. Why? The New York Times explains: The reticence […]

We just can’t win when it comes to environmental stewardship. After blithely polluting the skies for most of the 20th century, the US and Europe pushed through a number of laws in the 1970s-80s to clear the air. Now we’re finding out that in doing so, we’ve made more hurricanes. The FT reports: Until now, it was […]

If you’re looking for a job at Google, don’t rest on your Ivy League laurels.The company is taking a more data-centric approach to understanding what makes for successful hires, in lieu of focusing on degrees or transcripts. “G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless—no correlation at all except for […]

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Saturday that “outside” forces are driving protests in Turkey as well as Brazil. He alleged that a conspiracy of various media and interests, aided by Facebook and Twitter, were to blame for unrest in both countries. “They are controlled from the same centre. They are doing their best […]

In a move that would have the world awash in rage and grief had Israel done it, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi has tightened the screws on his country’s blockade of the Gaza Strip. Predictably, since it’s the Muslim Brotherhood government of Egypt and not Israel treating the Palestinians so pitilessly, nobody seems to care. Reuters […]