We got trouble, right here in Gary, Indiana. Business Insider reports that the city is practically a wasteland, with 6, 500 of 7,000 public properties abandoned. And that’s not all: Things are getting so bad that Gary officials are thinking about cutting off city services to about 40 percent of the city’s land and moving […]

His sweet and innocent-looking face dominates the most recent cover of Time magazine. He calls himself the “Burmese Bin Laden.” He warns his fellow Burmese that “crude and savage” Muslims are everywhere, out to get innocent Buddhists, to rape their daughters, to slaughter them. “We are being raped in every town, being sexually harassed in every town, […]

The melting Arctic ice has been a key measure of the pace of global warming for several years now, but a smart piece in Foreign Affairs argues that the regional melt is creating an economic boom: No matter what one thinks should be done about global warming, the fact is, it’s happening. And it’s not […]

Vocal Eurosceptics have gained a new ally: the Netherlands. The country’s government just released a document outlining Dutch objections to deeper European integration and listing key policy areas that the country will not hand over to Brussels. FT: “The Netherlands is convinced that the time of an ‘ever closer union’ in every possible policy area […]

School’s out for summer—school’s out forever!?Dallas high school juniors may soon find themselves singing that tune because of a plan by district officials to develop a three-year high school diploma. State legislators recently passed a bill that would allow officials to transfer funding set aside for a student’s unused senior year to students in pre-K […]

A bemusing altercation occurred between the offices of the Russian and German heads of state yesterday when Putin and Merkel first canceled, then rescheduled speeches at the opening of an art exhibition at St Petersburg’s historic Hermitage museum. It emerged that Merkel intended to use her speech to claim that some of the art in the exhibition was […]

When the US Supreme Court ruled in 2011 that the overcrowding and unsafe conditions in the California prison system amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, we labeled California a failed state, noting that when a state produces more prisoners than it can afford to house, it has failed at nearly all the things we ordinarily expect of […]

Republican politicians across the country are agitating for prison reform, according to a piece in the WSJ. Faced with overcrowded prisons, pressure from Evangelical Christians, and data pointing to the vicious crime cycles prisons encourage, GOP leaders are taking up reforms aimed at reducing the length of sentences and promoting rehabilitation: Just over half of the states […]

Now that California’s legislators have successfully pushed through tax increases and put the state budget back in the black, they deserve a bonus, don’t they? At least, that’s what an independent commission thinks, which has approved a 5.3 percent pay raise and a 10 percent increase in health care contributions for California state politicians (who, by […]

Headline coverage of the recently concluded G8 summit largely missed one of the more promising developments: the world’s biggest economic powers pledged to combat tax dodgers and the culture of hiding wealth offshore and underground, away from the taxman. The Economist has the story: On June 19th Swiss lawmakers voted down a bill that would […]