Forty thousand San Franciscans accustomed to using the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) were left scrambling today as 2,300-plus BART workers are on strike. Labor contracts for these employees expired at midnight without a new deal in place, as the city and labor unions couldn’t agree on pay, pension contributions, and medical costs. The Mercury […]

Teachers in Tennessee will be granted fewer automatic salary increases, a move that education association head Gera Summerford says will strike at the very heart of the school system.Teachers were originally entitled to 21 minimum pay levels (increasing from their first to their twentieth year of teaching), across five levels of education (from bachelor’s to doctorate). […]

The people who, in the words of the Chinese Communist Global Times newspaper, “burned and destroyed vehicles, and wielded knives, madly slashing and killing police and innocent members of the public” in Xinjiang last week received training in Syria. In all, 35 people were killed in those attacks. Reports out of Xinjiang are unreliable, especially […]

New York state isn’t exactly rolling in money, but some of its politicians are. Several county lawmakers have been fudging their time cards in order to collect pensions, according to an investigation. Ordinarily, officials are required to work a full thirty hours every week in order to receive benefits such as pensions and health care, […]

From the very beginning of the so-called revolution in Egypt, I have taken some pains to throw a wet mop in the face of all those clueless Western commentators who believed that democracy, as we understand it, let alone liberal democracy, was at hand in Egypt—or anywhere else in the Arab world save maybe Tunisia. […]

Florida Governor Rick Scott has signed a bill to expand the use of massively open online courseware in the state’s primary, secondary, and higher education systems. The law, which has been described as a slightly watered down version of an earlier bill, encourages public schools to use the courses as a teaching tool in certain […]

The Europeans are none too happy with President Obama. The German news magazine Der Spiegel broke news on Saturday that the NSA had bugged EU offices in Washington and New York, as well as a number of national embassies. The New York Times: According to Der Spiegel, the N.S.A. installed listening devices in European Union diplomatic offices […]

Student loans interest rates just doubled this morning, as Congress left for recess after failing to reach a deal by the July 1 deadline. College students will now be forced to pay the government an additional $2,600 on average.There’s still a chance that lawmakers could pass a bill that would apply retroactively, saving students from […]

The shale boom has given the US a massive windfall of new natural gas and oil, and it’s happened very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that the infrastructure to bring these resources to market has struggled to keep up. In the past three years, Texas’s Eagle Ford shale formation went from producing nearly zero barrels […]

Jefferson County has officially filed its plan to end the largest municipal bankruptcy in the US to date (we’ll see what Detroit has to say about that record). The plan is precedent setting, says Bloomberg, in that in marks the first time US municipal debt holders have been forced to accept a loss of principal […]