Soon after the white smoke rose from the roof of the Sistine Chapel, a Vatican official announced to the huge crowd gathered outside that “Habemus Papam!”—“We have a Pope!” Then Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, Archbishop of Buenos Aires, came out as well on the famous balcony and spoke to the crowd in fluent Italian (his […]

Americans haven’t been saving enough money, and now the US has entered a retirement crisis the likes of which it has not seen for decades. The WSJ has some shocking statistics from a study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute: Fifty-seven percent of U.S. workers surveyed reported less than $25,000 in total household savings and investments […]

Corn ethanol gets just about everything wrong: it increases emissions, it starves the world’s poor, it isn’t efficient, and it drains billions of taxpayer dollars in subsidies. As it turns out, it might also be responsible for last year’s violent labor protests in South Africa and food protests in Haiti and Argentina. The story was […]

As President Obama heads off for his first visit to Israel, we are getting the usual flood of poll results indicating that Americans want a pro-Israel foreign policy. Meanwhile, the world continues to marvel at American support for the frequently isolated Jewish state. Why, people ask, does the United States incur such risks and costs […]

Germany is planning to cut many of its flagship green programs. Funding for these policies relies heavily on the sale of carbon emissions certificates under Europe’s cap-and-trade system, but the price of carbon in that system has flatlined. Der Spiegel reports: The budget for 2014 includes €2 billion for the Energy and Climate Fund to be […]

The British media is abuzz this week over the creation of a new government-run press regulator. The NYT reports that the new code invests the regulator with the authority to “order prominent corrections in publications that breach standards,” a power now enshrined in the royal charter, which also sets the rules for the BBC and the […]

A Philadelphia-based physician is being charged with seven counts of first-degree murder for performing late-term abortions. If convicted, he could face the death penalty: In opening statements in court on Monday, prosecutors charged that [Dr. Kermit Gosnell] who operated a women’s health clinic [in Philadelphia] killed seven viable fetuses by plunging scissors into their necks […]

Governor Jerry brown has trumpeted his state’s “comeback,” but the jobs data tells a different story. The Labor Department reports that California is tied for the highest unemployment rate in the nation at 9.8 percent. The alarmingly high figure is matched only by Rhode Island, another state dealing with the consequences of a stale blue model.Yet […]

Advocates of single-payer have long pointed to VA hospitals as examples of how a single-payer, government-run health care system can work in America. But this NYT story on a whistleblower’s letter complaining about a “pattern of problems” at one Mississippi VA hospital paints a much less appealing portrait of these institutions: The problems over the last […]

Fifty-eight percent of lower and middle class women now give birth to their first child outside of wedlock, according to a new report from the National Marriage Project. As the report notes, this statistic largely follows from the trend toward delayed marriage: Americans…are postponing marriage to their late twenties and thirties for two main reasons, one […]