In our post yesterday on the California health care debacle, we noted that Republicans as well as Democrats share the blame for Obamacare—Democrats for designing and passing the law, Republicans for not offering any alternative. But it looks like recent electoral defeats and shifting socio-political relaties are forcing some creative intellectual ferment among reform-minded conservatives, […]

Turks have been taking to the street since Thursday across the country to protest the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan after local protests in Istanbul unleashed wider discontent. Turkey is a secular state, but many think Erdogan and his AK Party are turing into autocrats dedicated to “Islamicizing” the country. Today the protests […]

Via Lawyers, Guns & Money, our eyes were drawn to a story out of Missouri, where a judge ruled that a mining corporation in the throes of bankruptcy proceedings could cancel out its pension and retirement obligations to 20,000 workers and stop paying into the union pension fund as early as July 1. The details […]

In 2000, the British newspaper The Independent ran an article about the end of snow, quoting one of the world’s more prominent climate scientist like so: According to Dr. David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, within a few years winter snowfall will become […]

When people think of Sonoma County’s beautiful and lucrative wine country, they likely think of endless vineyards, rolling hills and the wealthy elite there to enjoy it. They probably don’t think of miles and miles of decrepit roads with potholes so many and massive that bikers and drivers can barely avoid accidents. But as Reuters […]

Edward Tenner at The Atlantic is worried that the boomers are getting a bad rap. The flapper generation, which came of age in the 1920s, was an equally controversial cohort, but they were able to dwindle off into old age in peace, while the boomers have become a punching bag for those complaining about American decline. […]

“It seems we must make a special effort on southern Libya,” said France’s Foreign Minister on a recent trip to the new focal point of the global war on terror: Africa. Libya is the “new Mali,” Reuters reports. (Wasn’t Mali the “new Libya” not all that long ago?)“The south of Libya is what the north of Mali was […]

The dominos keep falling on the California ACA story. Last week the state released official estimates about the cost of premiums under Obamacare, and the law’s supporters were jubilant.One the one hand, wonks like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein were happy that the estimates came in lower—in some cases, much lower—than the rates originally predicted by the Congressional Budget Office when […]

A pair of Russian opposition leaders is alleging that Kremlin cronies pocketed more than $30 billion in funds earmarked for the 2014 Sochi Olympics. This is hardly the first report of corruption related to the games, but these latest numbers, if true, are staggering. “The expenses for the Winter Olympics in Sochi turned out to be […]

The US Transportation Department has finally weighed in officially on driverless cars, and the verdict is good news for the tech’s supporters. Though officials don’t think the cars are ready for commercial use, they do recommend that states proceed with testing them. Moreover, the statement released by the department states that semiautonomous and driverless cars will significantly increase driver safety when they are eventually […]