AT the Zhuhai air show in southeastern China last November, Chinese companies startled some Americans by unveiling 25 different models of remotely controlled aircraft and showing video animation of a missile-armed drone taking out an armored vehicle and attacking a United States aircraft carrier.

The presentation appeared to be more marketing hype than military threat; the event is China’s biggest aviation market, drawing both Chinese and foreign military buyers. But it was stark evidence that the United States’ near monopoly on armed drones was coming to an end, with far-reaching consequences for American security, international law and the future of warfare.

The American Time Use Survey asks thousands of American residents to recall every minute of a day. Here is how people over age 15 spent their time in 2008.

One of the most influential economic papers of the postwar era was Kenneth Arrow’s Uncertainty and the welfare economics of health care, which demonstrated — decisively, I and many others believe — that health care can’t be marketed like bread or TVs. Let me offer my own version of Arrow’s argument.

China lijkt de slag om groene technologieën van de toekomst te gaan winnen omdat het de juiste grondstoffenvoorraden heeft. China is met name de belangrijkste producent van neodymium, een metaal dat gebruikt wordt in windturbines en elektrische auto’s. Experts achten de kans groot dat de VS en China hun volgende handelsoorlog uitvechten over het dure metaal.

Slate's Moneybox has an interactive map that shows job creation and loss throughout the US for the past two years. Watching it flow through each month's up and down definitely made the employment situation in the country clearer to me. Like any great visualization image and the legend make it very clear what's happening.

Two years ago, a dozen of the country’s major corporations, including Caterpillar, Duke Energy, and Dow Chemical, banded together with several of the nation’s leading environmental groups to form a group called the United States Climate Action Partnership. According to the group’s Web site, USCAP’s mission is to encourage “the federal government to enact legislation requiring significant reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” That’s a nice thought and by signing onto it USCAP’s members got a lot of nice press (including in The New Yorker). But a recent analysis of campaign giving by the non-profit group Clean Air Watch suggests that USCAP’s corporate members do not take USCAP’s goals terribly seriously. In fact, they seem to be devoting considerable resources to undermining them.

Surveillance Self-Defense (SSD) exists to answer two main questions: What can the government legally do to spy on your computer data and communications? And what can you legally do to protect yourself against such spying?

Simon Rogers gathers some of the key figures driving the political agenda in the United States. Download the data or access the API to build your own charts and visualizations.

FDR was our radio president, JFK was our television president and Barack Obama will be our Internet President.

Jim Lobe is best known for his coverage of U.S. foreign policy, particularly the neo-conservative influence in the Bush administration. The Washington Bureau Chief of the international news agency Inter Press Service (IPS), Lobe has also written for Foreign Policy In Focus, Alternet, Tompaine.com, and was featured in BBC and ABC television documentaries about motivations for the US invasion of Iraq.

MAPLight.org, a groundbreaking public database, illuminates the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes in unprecedented ways. Elected officials collect large sums of money to run their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. This common practice is contrary to the public interest, yet legal. MAPLight.org makes money/vote connections transparent, to help citizens hold their legislators accountable.

Follow the Oil Money is an interactive tool that tracks the flow of oil money in US politics.

Too many people think cloning cells for the fight against disease is the same thing as creating Frankenstein's monster. Too many people think evolution is the idea that people are descended from apes. And too many people think that genetic modification of