Worried by reports of rising defaults, investors turned up their noses at a new $225 million bond issue by Sallie Mae, the federal agency that packages individual student loans into large securities. The loan company canceled the offering after two weeks on the market. The WSJ reports: …rising defaults could have crimped the cash flow of the […]

Mid-level hospital jobs that don’t require a Bachelor’s Degree are quickly disappearing. The WSJ reports: Positions such as licensed practical nurses and medical-records clerks are being eliminated or pushed out of hospitals into lower-paying corners of the field such as nursing homes. Meanwhile, positions that were once an accessible first rung on the career ladder, such as […]

By May 8, all PKK fighters will withdraw from Turkey, the group’s commander said in a speech yesterday. The PKK—the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—has fought a war against Turkey for over three decades at a cost of tens of thousands of casualties. In recent months there have been hopeful yet tentative signals from both sides that the […]

Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and a Democratic mega-fundraiser, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was until recently chairman of GreenTech Automative, a foundering “green” automaker that can’t seem to create either the cars or the jobs it once promised. McAuliffe’s Republican opponent has predictably pounced on his involvement with GreenTech, which promised 1,500 jobs […]

After seeing its wealth decimated by the crash in 2008, California’s public pension system has just surpassed its pre-recession high and is now valued at $260.8 billion. Bloomberg reports: Calpers’s value was already in decline when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt in September 2008, leading to a panic that wiped out more than $6 trillion in […]

The trickle of Democrats getting shifty about Obamacare is quickly becoming a flood. Yesterday leading Democrats spent an hour at a senatorial lunch grilling President Obama’s Chief of Staff about the rollout of the health care law. Some were upset that the administration is paying for its publicity efforts with money from the Prevention and Public Health […]

The EU’s ongoing crisis is chipping away at the continent’s unity and extracting a terrible toll on a generation of workers in the Eurozone’s periphery. But less frequently noticed is how membership in the EU has lost its cachet. Although Balkan countries are still chomping at the bit to be let in (note the recent […]

Though the Western media has moved on, things remain tense on the Korean peninsula. Today South Korea withdrew all of its workers from Kaesong, the industrial park jointly operated by the North and the South. The NYT reports: The decision came hours after North Korea rejected South Korea’s proposal for talks on the future of the […]

Shinzo Abe is not backing down. Responding to China and South Korea’s protests over Japanese lawmakers visiting a controversial shrine in Tokyo, Abe made an inflammatory speech that’s sure to further anger the neighbors. With emotions running high over visits by members of his cabinet to a wartime memorial, Mr. Abe stoked passions further by […]

As the United States weighs its options in Syria over Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the violence in Iraq is flaring up into what increasingly looks like open warfare. Iraqi soldiers backed by tanks retook Suleiman Beg, a Sunni town north of Baghdad earlier today, after being driven out of town by gunmen yesterday, the […]