This may surprise “small government” conservative critics of President Obama, but under his watch more public sector jobs have been cut than in any comparable period over the past sixty years. The New York Times reports: The December jobs figures out today indicate that there were 725,000 more jobs in the private sector than at the […]

Two Indian soldiers were killed by Pakistani troops today, two days after one Pakistani was shot and killed in the first cross-border skirmish in Kashmir in years. Reuters reports on today’s incident: “The body of one of the soldiers was found ‘badly mutilated’ in a forested area of the Himalayan territory on the side controlled […]

The early successes of online ed ventures like Coursera and Udacity up to this point have left one important question unanswered: When (and how) should they make money, much less turn a profit? For all their achievements, measured in terms of a growing user base and rising enthusiasm, no venture has yet been able to […]

The United States has expressed concerns in the past about Iran’s reach in the Western Hemisphere, especially over the alleged 2011 plot to kill Saudi Ambassador Adel al-Jubeir on U.S. soil. Now President Obama has signed into law the Countering Iran in the Western Hemisphere Act: The law was the White House’s most public strategy to date […]

Modern India has struggled mightily to deliver sufficient power to its vast populace. Service interruptions are common, and this past summer India suffered the largest electricity blackout in human history.India is hoping a massive new dam system will keep the lights on, the NYT reports: As a solution, the government proposed constructing 292 dams throughout the […]

The higher ed bubble has claimed a new victim: MBAs. According to the WSJ, business graduates are now seeing the same wage depression that’s already decimated the legal profession and many graduate schools: Soaring tuition costs, a weak labor market and a glut of recent graduates . . . are upending the notion that professional degrees […]

No matter how you look at it, 3D printing is a game-changer. The U.S. currently leads, putting millions of dollars into developing the technology, but Germany now has its sights set on becoming number one. Der Spiegel reports: Along with US giants 3-D Systems and Stratasys, about 10 German companies provide [3D printing], some of them […]

The Palestinian Authority is being stiffed by its benefactors and can’t meet the payroll as a result. Its “nonmember state” UN status notwithstanding, the PA has been crippled by a lack of foreign largess. The AP reports: The crisis has worsened in recent years, and the government, the Palestinian Authority, has reached the point of not […]

David Brooks at the New York Times warns that our preferences for health care spending and for global power are about to collide: So far, defense budgets have not been squeezed by the Medicare vice. But that is about to change. Oswald Spengler didn’t get much right, but he was certainly correct when he told […]

Republicans are poised to take the semi-deserved brunt of public anger after the maddening fiscal cliff “showdown”, a further hit to a brand already tarnished by the 2012 election results. To all the political theorists, intellectuals, and social scientists cooking up strategies to revive the party, I say: Watch more TV. I don’t mean, of […]