Is Egypt’s revolution falling apart? Clashes between anti-government protestors and Muslim Brotherhood supporters turned deadly yesterday, leaving at least three—including an American college student—dead. These clashes come ahead of massive country-wide demonstrations against President Morsi scheduled for Sunday. The NYT reports that on-the-ground forces are even speaking of a civil war: The use of firearms […]

Is Kevin Rudd the canary in a global coal mine?Last week, the Australian Labor Party leader scored one of the biggest victories of his career, unseating former Prime Minister and rival Julia Gillard and taking her spot as PM. But the real challenge for Mr. Rudd is only beginning, as he is taking power just […]

Drones that spray pesticide; special soil sensors linked to iPads; devices that detect crop contamination. These are just a few of the innovations wielded by a new Silicon Valley -Big Ag partnership that hopes to rationalize farming. The FT reports that a “coalition of top technology and agricultural firms” has created the Steinbeck Innovation Cluster to test out […]

Monoliths were first made famous in the sci-fi masterpiece 2001, A Space Odyssey, but now a different sort of monolith  could be moving from fiction to reality in the near future. Columbia University professor Peter Eisenberger hopes to use monoliths—a component similar to the catalytic convertor that cleans up a car’s exhaust—to pull carbon dioxide out […]

Boston’s mayoral election is fast approaching, and the autonomy of city schools has become a key issue in the race. The Boston Globe reports: [T]here is growing momentum behind a fundamental rethinking of urban education that some believe could provide the foundation to actually reach that goal.That rethinking is being driven by an idea that has […]

It’s bad enough that student debt has topped $1 trillion, but what’s worse is that most of this debt is held by those least able to pay it off. A sobering new graphic in Bloomberg Businessweek revealed that more than half of all student debt is held by households with a net worth lower than $8,500. The […]

Earlier today, Lei Zhengfu was sentenced to 13 years in prison. Lei was the Communist Party secretary in the central city of Beibei, and his case began late last year with a video of him cavorting with an 18-year old mistress. It quickly became a national sensation, an emblem of Communist Party corruption. He was later […]

In response to rising wage costs in Indonesia, Nike is cutting the number of workers in its factories there, turning instead toward cutting-edge manufacturing technology. The FT reports that the company is now using 3D printing to make “prototype soles” and is exploring other ways to “engineer the labor out of the product.”The upward pressure on labor […]

More college grads than ever are now working as taxi drivers, firefighters, and bartenders. And this underemployment problem is likely to get worse before it gets better. That’s because, as Peter Orzag contends in Bloomberg, the market demand for cognitive skills associated with higher education has been in decline for 13 years. He borrows from […]

If you don’t know about ACOs, you should, for they could play a huge part in making our health system much smarter. Abhas Gupta reports on what an “ACO” is and how it could save US health care: An Accountable Care Organization (ACO) is a health system where providers—doctors, hospitals, etc.—agree to align financial incentives with better […]