The college affordability plan President Obama has been touting all week was finally released this morning, and universities are already paying close attention. The core idea is relatively simple: Building on the “college scorecard” idea, in which colleges are publicly ranked on criteria including tuition costs, student loan debt, graduation rates and average income of […]

Reports of anti-Christian violence have been filtering out of Egypt for weeks now, but a new report by the Human Right’s Commission paints a comprehensive picture of the persecution. At least 37 churches have been burned or damaged, and survivors of some of the attacks have harrowing tales to tell: Another Dalga resident, Sameer Lamie, […]

Vestas is a Danish company that manufactures wind turbines, and it used to be the global leader in its industry. Things look much different at the company now, after its CEO was sacked on Wednesday in the face of plummeting profits and market share. Share prices are down 85 percent from this time five years […]

Bo Xilai’s trial, the prosecution of the highest-profile Chinese statesman in decades, started in China this morning. Onlookers were roundly surprised by Bo’s feisty defense and denials of wrongdoing: he claimed to have never received bribes from Xu Ming, a businessman who testified to providing Bo and his family with $3.3 million in exchange for help […]

While France’s foreign minister demanded that “a reaction of force must be taken” if it turns out Assad was behind yesterday’s chemical weapons attack in Damascus, Time is reporting that the tone coming out of the White House is decidedly… less decisive: “We are calling for this U.N. investigation to be conducted,” said Obama spokesman Josh Earnest. […]

Iran’s got a new oil minister, and he’s keen on ramping up the country’s oil production capacity and, eventually, its production. Bijan Zanganeh is seen as a much more technocratic appointee than his predecessor, and has a proven track record—he was Iran’s oil minister during the country’s so-called “golden age” of production in the late nineties […]

A new study released yesterday by the Kaiser foundation found that in 2013 health care premiums went up 4 percent for families and 5 percent for individuals. That’s down from the 10 percent increases we saw in the early aughts. Obamacare supporters have been quick to grab it as a political football, arguing that this data proves […]

We’ve devoted considerable space on this blog documenting the ways in which student debt prevents young people from beginning their lives as adults. A study from Demos, for example, finds that among college graduates, those without student debt are more likely to own a home and enjoy lower interest rates on their mortgages. But the effects […]

An internal Communist Party memo, seen by the New York Times and confirmed by at least four high ranking officials, underscores President Xi Jinping’s desire to shore up Party control over the state. Document #9 apparently describes seven “perils” that threaten the Party, according to the Times: The first was “Western constitutional democracy”; others included promoting […]

Israel is already drilling for natural gas offshore in the Mediterranean, but in the coming years it is expected to ramp up production of the more than 40 trillion cubic feet (tcf) of natural gas in the region’s Levant basin. So is Cyprus, which discovered its own field in 2011 with an estimated 7 tcf of […]