The Heartland Institute

New Hampshire’s House and Senate voted to overturn a veto from Democratic Gov. John Lynch of Senate Bill 406, a medical malpractice reform law. The bill—one of six of the Democrat governor’s vetoes overridden by the Republican-controlled legislature on June 27—will supplement the existing tort process in New Hampshire with an ...

First Stockton, then San Bernardino. Moody’s Investors Service worries more could be on the way. Stockton, California, filed for bankruptcy in late June, followed less than two weeks later by another major California city, San Bernardino. These recent municipal bankruptcy filings signal more cities may be losing their willingness ...

From the Tech Liberation Front : Proponents of higher taxes have taken to calling the exemption that out-of-state online shoppers enjoy a “loophole,” as if it were an unintended flaw in two established court rulings that addressed the power of one state to tax residents of another. My latest commentary at Reason.org looks at ...

Between 30 and 40 percent of students in every grade level say school is “too easy,” according to a report from the Center for American Progress. The report examined student surveys collected by the National Association for Educational Progress, a widely trusted nationwide test conducted every year. “There’s a popular perception ...

A group of free-market think tanks Monday filed a brief in federal court challenging the constitutionality of the Federal Communication Commission's 2011 "Preserving the Open Internet" Order. The group's amici curiae brief says the FCC's rule denies Internet service providers their constitutional rights and forces consumers to "bear ...

Last week the Washington Post had an extensive write-up about how an anemia drug cost taxpayers billions of dollars without making much of a difference for those receiving it. The piece is available here. It shows that far from being arbiters more sensitive to costs, bureaucracies are warped by industry and lobbyists all the ...

Two lawsuits have been filed against Kim Kardashian and her family in West Virginia, with weird allegations. As if their reality weren’t already weird enough. One lawsuit alleges Kardashian and her ex-husband Kris Humphries and his new girlfriend Myla Sinanaj held the plaintiff at gunpoint in a hotel room along with a ...

On his office wall, Phil Kilgore has pasted “100 different stickies” to a United States map. Each marks where a group of people want to open a “classical” charter school. In directing Hillsdale College’s charter school initiative, Kilgore said he has discovered a rising wave of ordinary citizens who hope to serve their country ...

Nearly half of the claimed warming during the past century did not occur in the real world but is merely the creation of flawed data adjustments, reports a new paper presented at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union. Removing flawed adjustments to raw temperature readings shows the Earth warmed merely 0.42 degrees during ...

San Antonio Mayor Julian Castro has proposed increasing the city’s sales tax to 8.25 percent to expand government-sponsored pre-kindergarten. The proposal is estimated to spend $140 million over its first five years to offer taxpayer-paid, full-day programs to 4,000 children each year who, according to state and federal guidelines ...

A House panel approved a bill that would axe President Obama's signature education programs , Race to the Top and other grants. It would also reinstate the rule that allows alternately certified teachers to count as "highly qualified." Charter schools raise education standards for vulnerable children. Accidentally disclosed letters ...

Every few months or so, global warming alarmists revise their talking points and march like lemmings off a cliff with a new media catch phrase. The Official Global Warming Theme of Summer 2012 is “This is what global warming looks like.” And by golly, the alarmists finally got it right. Alarmists point to current wildfires ...

And they appear to be prepared to do it rapidly, as the authors of this report discovered that offspring phenotypes fully adapted to the increase in temperature within a mere two generations, which finding, in the words of the authors, “could indicate that some tropical marine species are more capable of coping with global ...

A New Jersey woman held hostage at knifepoint in a shopping mall until a township police officer shot and killed her captor plans to sue the local township for $5 million, alleging she was psychologically injured as a result of the police officer’s actions. The captor was being pursued by police after a shoplifting incident ...

To the dismay of United Kingdom teachers’ unions, this school year 600,000 British students will be tested on basic grammar and writing. Ten- and 11-year-olds must be able to spell, use apostrophes properly, and identify nouns, verbs, and adjectives to pass the test, part of an education overhaul. UK officials have begun making ...

The U.S. Department of Education has now waived No Child Left Behind for 32 states that agreed to reconfigure their education systems according to the executive branch’s preferences, with four more waiver applications under review. Washington DC also received a waiver. NCLB governs most federal K-12 spending and mandates. The ...

Joy Pullmann, managing editor of The Heartland Institute's School Reform News and editor of the Education section of the Heartlander digital magazine, spoke at CPAC Chicago on the "Lake Woebegon Effect" on education. The introduction rightly credits Heartland's SRN as being a pioneer in publishing news and information on school ...

This school year Florida’s seventh graders will have to take a new standardized civics test. In 2014-2015, students must pass it to move up to high school. After four years of tinkering with the idea in response to extremely low civics knowledge among Florida’s students and general public, the Florida House and Senate unanimously ...

Calling it “a great milestone,” Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation CEO Dan Grabauskas has submitted a Full Funding Grant Agreement to the Federal Transit Administration requesting $1.55 billion for Honolulu’s 20-mile elevated steel on steel rail project. This is the first step toward getting funding for the $5 billion ...

Talk about key man. More than $600 billion is currently managed by hedge funds whose founders will turn at least 60 years old in the next decade, according to Institutional Investor magazine. The retirement – or death – of star traders can wreak havoc on an asset management firm. “Billions of dollars worth of assets . . . are ...