Econ 101: The Dow Jones rose 421 points yesterday, the market’s biggest one-day spike in three years. Investors were excited about earnings reports. At the same time the price of oil continued to slide under $56 a barrel. While that’s …

Cuban Surprise: President Obama shocked the world and his Republican opponents announcing yesterday that 50 years of shunning Cuba is a failure and that the US is re-establishing diplomatic relations with the island country just 90 miles off the coast …

Massacre: In a continuing war against education, yesterday’s Taliban attack on a Pakistani school in Peshawar resulted in the death of 141 people, 132 of them just schoolchildren. Authorities say nine Taliban gunmen assaulted the compound of the Army Public …

Taliban Attack: In one of Pakistan’s worst terror incidents in recent years, Taliban gunmen are reported to have killed at least 126 people and taken hostages in an assault on a school in northwestern Pakistan. About a half-dozen Taliban gunmen …

Down Under: Police in Sydney have locked down the central business district of Australia’s largest city as they negotiate with a gunman who’s taken hostages in a café. Five people are reported to have escaped but more are inside. The …

Congress Passes a Bill!!!!!: Working instead of attending Christmas parties, the Senate last night passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill that will keep the government running. Some Republicans were angry with their own Ted Cruz from Texas whose procedural maneuver …

Nation: Police early this morning arrested a 22-year-old suspect in the shooting yesterday of four students at a Portland, Ore. high school for troubled kids. They had stopped his car at 1:30 in the morning and found that he had …

The Torture Debate: CIA Director John Brennan gave a rare press conference admitting his agency did “abhorrent” things interrogating terror suspects but that the so-called “enhanced” methods produced information that stopped attacks and saved lives. While saying CIA interrogators “went …

Econ 101: US stocks took a slide yesterday greased by the falling price of oil. The Dow Jones dropped 268 points as oil headed toward $60 a barrel, the lowest in five years. US oil production, among other factors, is …

The Torture Report: The Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday released a blistering report that says the CIA misled the government about the severity of its interrogation techniques and the usefulness of information acquired through torture of terror suspects. The report’s summary …