After a week and a half of violent clashes between protesters and police throughout Turkey, things don’t seem to be cooling off. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced today that the government will not halt its controversial plans to develop a park. This morning riot police and demonstrators clashed again around the contested Taksim Square […]

An aggressive campaign seeks to lure the American workforce back to manufacturing, the WSJ reports: Manufacturers, government officials and nonprofits across the country are looking for ways to get the country’s brightest kids fired up about industry. They’re setting up engineering contests, backing classroom projects where kids design everything from audio speakers to artificial limbs, […]

Ding-dong, the wicked witch of farming subsidies might soon be dead. Last year a comprehensive farm bill reform stalled in the House of Representatives, forcing Congress to extend the 2008 bill for another year. But yesterday the Senate passed a new farm bill, and it looks like the House version has a fighting chance of […]

Nearly a third of the world’s technically recoverable natural gas and 10 percent of its oil can be found in shale formations, according to a new report by the Energy Information Administration.  Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, there’s a bounty of oil and gas available to countries around the world .This report, which has a […]

North Korea canceled high-level talks with South Korea scheduled for later this week, apparently because the South’s choice of negotiator was for some reason unacceptable. “We consider the North Korean decision very regrettable,” said a South Korean government spokesman. They were to have been the highest-level talks in six years.Yesterday we noted that North Korea’s […]

Today’s Telegraph has an excerpt from a recent speech given in London by David Petraeus, former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former director of the CIA. It is a sober and informative reflection on the Global War on Terror and what General Petraeus believes Britain and America’s duties are going forward. As […]

The euro crisis is so large, and its real world effects so tragic, that people often forget that the monetary mess is only one of many areas in which the EU isn’t working. Here’s a big one: Europe doesn’t have a security strategy and doesn’t want to talk about it. Judy Dempsey, editor-in-chief of Strategic Europe […]

Black men are more eager for long-term relationships (in most cases, this means marriage) than black women, according to a new study released jointly by NPR, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Harvard School of Public Health. The results, which surprised the researchers, indicated that 43 percent of black men were inclined to say they wanted […]

Online classrooms may be the way of the future, but they aren’t very effective without a little old-fashioned face-to-face learning. That’s the finding of a new study from the journal Research & Practice in Assessment, which has conducted one of the first comprenesive studies of the functioning of MOOCs. The study combed through student data from MIT’s “Circuits […]

French President Francois Hollande is dealing with a pension system €14 billion in debt and a political base that is unwilling to do what it takes to stop the bleeding. Keen to avoid the union-mobilized protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people to the streets when Nicolas Sarkozy raised the retirement age from 60 […]