Slip on your gloves and pin on your tiara. The Washington Post reports on the growth of “professional princesses” who lead parties for girls across the country: Amid thousands of princess products and millions of begowned little girls, it turns out there is a decent living to be made by chipper-voiced entrepreneurs ready to displace the old […]

I am told that tickets are still available for the third and last performance of the Ring cycle at the Metropolitan Opera this spring. For anyone who cares about music or wants to see one of the greatest creations of the human spirit brilliantly realized, this is an opportunity not to be missed.As the curtain […]

There are now six million unemployed in Spain, the highest level of unemployment since the country first started keeping records. The FT reports that France also posted record joblessness numbers, with unemployment rates breaking the previous 1997 high. What will the long-term effects of these staggering totals be? The fear voiced by many analysts is […]

Worried by reports of rising defaults, investors turned up their noses at a new $225 million bond issue by Sallie Mae, the federal agency that packages individual student loans into large securities. The loan company canceled the offering after two weeks on the market. The WSJ reports: …rising defaults could have crimped the cash flow of the […]

Mid-level hospital jobs that don’t require a Bachelor’s Degree are quickly disappearing. The WSJ reports: Positions such as licensed practical nurses and medical-records clerks are being eliminated or pushed out of hospitals into lower-paying corners of the field such as nursing homes. Meanwhile, positions that were once an accessible first rung on the career ladder, such as […]

By May 8, all PKK fighters will withdraw from Turkey, the group’s commander said in a speech yesterday. The PKK—the Kurdistan Workers’ Party—has fought a war against Turkey for over three decades at a cost of tens of thousands of casualties. In recent months there have been hopeful yet tentative signals from both sides that the […]

Chairman of Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign and a Democratic mega-fundraiser, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe was until recently chairman of GreenTech Automative, a foundering “green” automaker that can’t seem to create either the cars or the jobs it once promised. McAuliffe’s Republican opponent has predictably pounced on his involvement with GreenTech, which promised 1,500 jobs […]

After seeing its wealth decimated by the crash in 2008, California’s public pension system has just surpassed its pre-recession high and is now valued at $260.8 billion. Bloomberg reports: Calpers’s value was already in decline when Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. went bankrupt in September 2008, leading to a panic that wiped out more than $6 trillion in […]

The trickle of Democrats getting shifty about Obamacare is quickly becoming a flood. Yesterday leading Democrats spent an hour at a senatorial lunch grilling President Obama’s Chief of Staff about the rollout of the health care law. Some were upset that the administration is paying for its publicity efforts with money from the Prevention and Public Health […]

The EU’s ongoing crisis is chipping away at the continent’s unity and extracting a terrible toll on a generation of workers in the Eurozone’s periphery. But less frequently noticed is how membership in the EU has lost its cachet. Although Balkan countries are still chomping at the bit to be let in (note the recent […]