Billionaire wildcatter Audrey McClendon, the co-founder and former CEO of oil and gas drilling giant Chesapeake Energy, is betting big on a new fracking front in Ohio. McClendon is hoping that southeast Ohio’s Utica shale formation will prove to be as profitable as North Dakota’s Bakken formation or Texas’s Barnett shale. The WSJ reports: Mr. McClendon’s deal-making […]

The New Republic’s Jonathan Cohn has been a vocal supporter of Obamacare, but in his latest piece he stops just short of calling Obama’s recent remarks on rate spikes a lie. The piece, entitled “Obama Made a Misleading Statement About Obamacare Rates,” considers Obama’s claim that those currently uninsured will get “significantly cheaper” insurance rates under the […]

Blue states like California and Illinois are  struggling meeting obligations for their own public pension funds, so they certainly don’t need this latest bit of news—their tax bases are shrinking drastically. A new study on state-by-state income migration from the Tax Foundation (h/t WSJ), found that New York, California, and Illinois—the largest blue states in […]

Reports are emerging today of a horrific chemical weapons attack in a suburb of Damascus. Reuters initially put the tally at “over 200” dead. An opposition group counted 494 dead. George Sabra, an opposition official, said 1,300 people had died. Images and videos of children and women and elderly and ordinary people, dead without visible […]

The British Catholic journal The Tablet carried a story on August 3, 2013 that I found suggestive (although its topic is not terribly interesting in itself). The story reports on the surprising growth in England of the Roman Catholic Congregation of the Oratory. This is not a monastic order but a community of secular priests, […]

For Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan, it’s Jews all the way down. The Gezi Park protests were apparently the fault of a shadowy “interest rate lobby”, and now he informs us that Israel was behind Egypt’s ouster of its Islamist president Mohammed Morsi: “What do they say in Egypt? Democracy is not the ballot box. What […]

The alarm bells are going off in Asia: China, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia and India are all facing negative economic news. And some are beginning to worry that we could be back to the conditions of the 1997 Asian financial crisis: “All this QE [quantitative easing] money has lead to a massive credit inflation bubble in Asia,” said […]

Pervez Musharraf, the former dictator of Pakistan who recently made a triumphant return to his country from exile only to be put under house arrest, has been charged with murdering former prime minister Benazir Bhutto today. Bhutto was killed in 2007, when a suicide bomber attacked a campaign rally only weeks after she returned to […]

When parents complain about the high cost of college tuition, college admissions officers often respond by pointing out that few students pay the full sticker price, due to scholarships and federal aid programs. According to the Department of Education, in the 2011-12 school year 57 percent of students relied on some form of federal aid, […]

Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto isn’t the only one with a plan to reform Pemex, the country’s bloated, mismanaged oil and gas monopoly. His proposal, which involves reforms to the country’s constitution that would allow foreign firms access to Mexican hydrocarbons via profit-sharing agreements, will have the two-thirds majority it would need to pass the legislature […]