There are a lot of reasons to embrace teleworking: a better work-life balance, cutting out a polluting and unhealthy commute, saving money on office real estate and gas, and even boosting productivity. Given the advantages, we’d like to see more businesses adopt telework policies for their workers (looking at you, Yahoo!) and more government policies enable […]

For the past few days, thousands of angry Brazilians have been flowing out into the streets of major cities in protest, paralyzing city centers, burning vehicles, looting and vandalizing stores, even attempting to storm government buildings in Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Brasilia.It’s quite frightening to watch so many people here in Brazil protesting […]

Above: Egyptian riot police try to disperse clashes between supporters the ruling Muslim Brotherhood and protestors calling for the resignation of Culture Minister Alaa Abdel Aziz in Cairo on June 11, 2013. Photo courtesy of Getty Images. The revolutions that swept the Arab world in early 2011 took on a distinctive character in the nations they touched, […]

China has just launched its first cap-and-trade experiment in Shenzhen, one of seven cities singled out for pollution cuts by 2014. The policy starts today in Shenzhen, and will then be rolled out in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Chongqing and the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong. If the program is successful in these areas, China plans […]

At the end of September 2011, after Burma’s President announced that construction on a huge dam on the Irrawaddy River would be suspended indefinitely, the head of the Chinese company in charge of the project told a newspaper reporter that he was “totally astonished” by the news. Canceling construction on the dam was the most eyebrow-raising event […]

Blue power is in big trouble in Detroit, where the threat of bankruptcy has both public sector unions and municipal bondholders at the barrel of a gun. Mary Williams Walsh’s report in the NYT today makes it clear that unless unions can find a way to make other creditors take all the pain, they’re going […]

More than a hundred thousand protesters gathered in big cities across Brazil yesterday after the government raised bus fares across the country. As in Turkey, the protests spread rapidly and soon turned violent, tapping into a broader discontent around the country. Part of the state legislature in Rio de Janeiro was set on fire. NYT: While […]

After two months of delays, India is expected to release a much-anticipated national policy on shale gas policy any day now. It’s about time; as the Diplomat reports, there is a lot to be gained from the extraction of the resource: As the third-largest energy consumer in the world, according to a 2011 Enerdata report, and a natural gas net […]

Jefferson County, Alabama, is trying to put its terrible fiscal woes behind it after coming to a deal to exit the largest municipal bankruptcy in the nation’s history earlier this month. The county’s crushing debt load can mostly be traced back to a number of dodgy deals struck with J.P. Morgan to finance improvements to […]

One billion euros in aid that the EU gave to Egypt over the past six years has gone to waste, the EU’s spending watchdog reported today in a scathing assessment. Sixty percent of that aid—€600 million—is unaccounted for.“They do not fulfill the conditions at all—and nevertheless, the money is given,” one of auditors official who conducted […]