Today, April 19, marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. What can one possibly say about this event that has not already been said many times over many years? What is there, if anything, that might be noteworthy about a 70th anniversary?Maybe there is something to say; hence this post. […]

Four toddlers died in a fire when 22-year-old day care operator Jessica Tata left the children under her care unsupervised during a quick run to Target. This is just one story among many illustrating the desperate need for federally funded child care, or so argues Jonathan Cohn in the New Republic: A 2007 survey by the National […]

Canyon Lake, a small gated city in Southern California, has just announced plans to withdraw from Calpers. The move comes in response to the pension fund’s recent suggestion that cities kick in as much as 50 percent more to the fund to keep benefits secure. Calpers requires a “termination fee” for any municipality looking to exit, […]

The battery of the future will be measured in millimeters and recharged in seconds. Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have designed a new lithium-ion battery that’s 2,000 times more powerful than current storage technology and can be recharged 1,000 times quicker: The batteries owe their high performance to their internal three-dimensional microstructure. Batteries […]

Perversely, China accused Japan today of escalating tension in the East China Sea by scrambling fighter jets every time Chinese aircraft or ships violate Japan’s territory. Japan announced yesterday that it had sent its own planes to intercept Chinese aircraft a record 306 times in the year ending March 31, double the number of times in the previous […]

Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) is now warning that the Affordable Care Act, much of which he helped write, is heading for a “huge train-wreck.” At a Senate hearing yesterday, Baucus took HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to task for the botched implementation of the ACA. In particular, he argued that the insurance exchanges consumers will use to buy […]

The mainstream media is shocked and bewildered today at how spectacularly each of the President’s gun control proposals flopped in the Senate. After weeks of a full court press by the media and countless speeches by the President, there were more votes in the Senate yesterday to gut gun control than to tighten it; a proposal […]

In one of the more bizarre events to befall Pakistan’s election season, Pervez Musharraf, the former military dictator, fled the Islamabad High Court building today after a judge ordered him arrested for treason. Musharraf and his security detail literally hustled out of court and, as numerous police watched, jumped in a black SUV and fled.Musharraf had been […]

Chinese investment in clean energy jumped twenty percent last year, helping the world’s biggest producer and consumer of energy to vault past the US as the world’s top investor in clean tech, according to a new report by Pew Charitable Trusts: In 2012, China advanced its position as the epicenter of clean energy finance, attracting $65.1 […]