Britain is the latest battleground where advocates  and opponents of fracking are arguing over the controversial method of extracting oil and gas from shale. The British Geological Survey doubled its estimates of the country’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves earlier this summer. Green activists have stalled exploratory drilling in the tiny village of Balcombe, prompting […]

Black smoke billowed above Tripoli, a large port city in northern Lebanon, this morning after explosions hit two mosques; early reports say that at least 27 people were killed and 400 wounded. The Taqwa and Salam mosques have hosted some of the most vitriolic of Lebanon’s Sunni preachers who have been criticizing Hezbollah, the Shiite militant group […]

Local governments across the country are cutting back on employee hours in anticipation of the Affordable Care Act. WaPo has a rundown of recent examples: Middletown Township, New Jersey is cutting back hours for 25 part-time workers; Bee County, Tex., is capping part-time hours at 24 per week; Brevard County, Fla., is pursuing similar policies. More: “It’s not […]

The shale revolution has largely been an American phenomenon. US geology is particularly suited to horizontal well drilling, and shale operations in countries like China and Australia have to contend with water scarcity. Europe’s shale has been blocked by the continent’s greens, and though the UK has made most of the region’s headlines recently for […]

Now that Detroit’s bankruptcy filing is official, the battle between Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr and union leaders over the health of the city’s pensions has taken center stage. The key question is: How healthy are the city’s pensions, exactly? As we’ve seen before, it’s a difficult question to answer, as relatively minor-seeming changes in the […]

In early August, TAI editor Adam Garfinkle sat down with General Michael V. Hayden in his Washington office to talk about recent intelligence-related headlines and what is behind those headlines. General Hayden, a retired Air Force Four-Star, has served as director of the National Security Agency (1999–2005), as Principal Deputy to the Director of National Intelligence (2005–06) and as director of the Central Intelligence Agency (2006–09). Here is a lightly edited transcript of that conversation.

Even a well-designed law can have unintended effects that worsen the problems it was meant to solve—and a slipshod law like Obamacare threatens to cause serious damage. UPS, for instance, has decided to stop offering insurance to employee spouses who can get insurance from their own employer. The company cites the new costs imposed by Obamacare, […]

Earlier this week we wrote about Israel’s progress toward extracting its gas bounty, and noted that its next challenge will be figuring out how to get that gas to market. It has nearly 34 trillion cubic feet of natural gas that will likely find its way to Europe by pipeline, either underneath the Mediterranean or […]

In April we warned that dozens of cities in New York State were facing financial catastrophe stemming from underfunded pension liabilities. It turns out that we may have been lowballing it. Moody’s has just announced that the Long Island town of Huntington, NY could be downgraded for repeatedly delaying pension payments to fund short-term projects. […]

The price of carbon in California hit its lowest point this year at the most recent quarterly auction of emissions allowances. The price per metric ton of carbon was lower than expected, down 13 percent from the last auction in May. As Bloomberg reports, the low price was likely due to California’s stated plan to give […]