Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan during the Global Alcohol Policy Symposium. A couple months ago, Philip Howard, a professor at the University of Washington and the Central European University, was walking past Gezi Park with a Turkish friend at dusk. He had just joined Philip from prayers and asked him what he thought about the brewing debate over the [...]

Recent lawsuits and Justice Department investigations have uncovered grotesque abuses of mentally ill inmates at state and local prisons. It has been an extraordinary three weeks , and maybe the darkest period in the history of the American penal system. In four states the systemic abuse and neglect of inmates, and especially mentally ill inmates, [...]

When a bridge falls in America, like this one near Seattle last week, infrastructure spending has a way of transforming into a national obsession. Fortunately, falling bridges in America are still a rarity. But, infrastructure spending is being squeezed at the very moment that infrastructure spending is a historic bargain for the federal government.    

Governments can be extremely antagonistic to personal photography. You should get yourself ready for the imagery war against personal photography and capturing of video. In some ways, this war isn’t just coming, it’s already begun. Forces are lining up on both sides and preparing for action. And the anti-imagery people may have a better chance [...]

Google Glass Privacy issues related to Google Glass are drawing government attention. A U.S. Congressional Privacy Caucus committee sent a letter to Google chief executive Larry Page asking just how the company plans to protect both people wearing the device and the people it records.    

At $1.1 trillion, student debt eclipses all other forms of household debt, except for home mortgages. The U.S. government is forecast to turn a record $51 billion profit this year from student loan borrowers, a sum greater than the earnings of the nation’s most profitable companies and roughly equal to the combined net income of [...]

The new attacks seek to destroy data or to manipulate industrial machinery and take over or shut down the networks that deliver energy or run industrial processes. Warnings from federal officials, including a vague one issued last week by the Department of Homeland Security, are being prompted by a new wave of cyberattacks that are striking [...]

Every business could face 46 separate audits (from the 45 states that collect sales taxes plus the District of Columbia). Legislation on internet sales tax could subject small online businesses to up to 46 state audits. And since sales taxes vary among thousands of tax jurisdictions across the country, the chances that auditors will find [...]

In the Transparency Report’s latest edition, Google has revealed that the final six months of 2012 saw an increase in government requests to remove content — often YouTube videos. Google received 2,285 such requests (compared with 1,811 during the first half of 2012) that named a total of 24,179 pieces of content for removal (compared [...]

How we pay taxes. Taxes are complicated. There are a lot of numbers involved.  But that’s where graphs help answer the biggest questions: Where do our tax dollars come from? Where do they go? Who pays how much? How has it changed over time?