How polluted is a 19-mile stretch of the Fu River downstream from a local chemical plant in central China? Absurdly polluted. Toxic runoff killed approximately 100,000 kilograms of fish, environmental protection officials said today. NYT: Tests conducted by environmental protection officials from Xiaogan City revealed ammonia concentrations in the river waters downstream from the plant […]

This week, Spain is pushing a new pension reform plan that could help put the country’s shaky pension system on stronger footing. Amid a number of minor tweaks, the plan’s major change would be to link pension payments to life expectancy—meaning that as life expectancy rises, the annual payout would decrease to make the funds […]

The Obama administration has made several changes to the Affordable Care Act during the implementation process, yielding to the concerns of different constituencies. But it has left one major special interest unappeased: labor. Union leaders want Obama to amend the ACA so that multi-employer union health plans qualify for subsidies. Right now, union plans don’t […]

Mexican President Peña Nieto’s education reform sailed through the Senate today, finally clearing the biggest hurdle to passage. The vote, a major victory for Peña, comes amid resistance from the country’s powerful teachers unions, who were dead set against the law and vowed to challenge it through a series of protests in the country’s capital. One of […]

Imagine you are the only child of two elderly, divorced parents who live in two different states, both of which are far from the state where you live. They ailing and need regular care, but you can’t afford to pay for home care or nursing homes for both of them. The cost of airfare and […]

Slogging your way to and from work every day makes for bad citizens, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Connecticut and Stony Brook University. Longer commutes drain the will to participate in politics (by, for example, voting, contacting one’s political representative, or working on campaigns). From the report (h/t Lukas […]

Russia and the EU have been waging a shadow war against each other’s economic union for quite awhile now, with Moscow’s Eurasian Customs Union on one side and the European Union free trade zone on the other. Moscow has had some trouble competing: so far, the only countries with Russia in the ECU are Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan […]

On August 30, 2013, the Washington Post carried a story about a draft for the new Egyptian constitution, which is to replace the one promulgated in 2012 under President Morsi. The latter had pushed through that constitution in a parliament packed with supporters of his Muslim Brotherhood (this was one of the reasons for the […]

Nebraska’s demolition of an old mall earlier this year could have been a story about the declining fortunes of malls in a digital age. Malls across the country have been abandoned or repurposed for schools or clinics in large part because online shopping offers more and better benefits for the consumer than the bricks-and-mortar retail experience. Demolishing or converting an […]

Are American schools trying to stamp out free thinkers? Elizabeth Weil raises this question in an excellent piece for The New Republic on the rise of “social and emotional learning” (or SEL), in which children are trained to avoid bad behavior and to keep an “internal monitor” on their own actions to keep their impulses in […]