A leaked document shows that EU leaders are thinking about putting the brakes on their green ambitions in favor of growth-inducing policies. A 2008 EU law requires the bloc to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent by 2020. Wide-eyed green optimists hoped the EU would set 40 percent reduction goals for 2030. But as lawmakers […]

Citing rising costs, poor performance, and enrollment as low as 20 percent in some schools, Philadelphia has opted to close and consolidate 23 of its underperforming schools. Given the city’s $1.35 billion budget deficit and the fact that the district is operating 25 percent below capacity, this decision was a long time in coming.Philadelphia is […]

Anne-Marie Slaughter’s much lauded article, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All”, concludes with an exhortation to women: “We have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too.” Indeed many firms are already promoting policies to open up […]

Beijing plans to send a survey team to the disputed Senkaku Islands very soon, Chinese state media reported this week. This would be a significant escalation in the two countries’ tussle.Accompanying the announcement of the survey expedition is an inflammatory op-ed in this morning’s Global Times, the mouthpiece of the Communist Party in China. China has […]

Forget Robocop: The future belongs to Robosurgeon.Popular Mechanics offers an informative look at the role robots are already playing in operating rooms across the country. Currently most robosurgeons are artificial arms that must be controlled by humans. Their inputs can be smoothed to reduce the unsteadiness human hands bring into the OR, but they still require a human operator. That’s […]

Nearly a hundred Muslim fighters are returning to the Netherlands from conflicts in Syria, Africa, and elsewhere in the Middle East. The Dutch government has announced that it is now “monitoring” them for signs of extremism, says the BBC: “The chance of an attack in the Netherlands or against Dutch interests abroad has risen,” said […]

Historians may mark 2012 as a key year in tracing Europe’s decline as a global military player. For the first time in centuries, annual defense spending among Asian countries has exceeded that of European countries.Reuters summarizes “The Military Balance: 2013“, an annual report by IISS, a British think tank: China’s defense spending in real terms rose […]

Even if Europe manages to put off the worst of its economic crisis, it will soon have an even bigger problem on its hands: the alienation and desperation of an entire generation of young people. Fifty-seven percent of Greeks ages 15-24 are out of work. Spain, Italy, and Portugal show similarly high numbers of unemployed youth. As European […]

Your car has a computer, but chances are you’re not very good at using it. That’s not your fault. A lot of that computing power is under the hood, so to speak, and your car’s user interface needs to be simple enough to be operated while driving. But a new service promises to sync your […]

G.K. Chesterton tells the story of the time that St. Francis of Assisi visited Rome and the pope of the day proudly showed him all the wondrous treasures of the Vatican. Referring to a story in the Biblical Book of Acts in which St. Peter spoke with a beggar in Jerusalem and told him he […]