Christian Science Monitor

For the first time in 50 years, Cubans will be able to freely buy and sell their homes. As news of this long-awaited and the biggest yet of Raul Castro’s slow-moving but continuing, irreversible economic reform campaign in Cuba reverberated on and off the island, policymakers in Washington are increasingly – embarrassingly – out of step with what’s actually happening on the island today. It's like the US embargo has become a wax feature at Madame Tussauds: questionably life-like and stuck forever in one moment in time.

... and it's clearly in their best interest to see a sustainable fiscal plan in place so they can invest,” says Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, who has been working with the bipartisan group. ...

These examples, and many more, are cited in “Hear Us Now,” a survey of the use of digital tools by California's local governments released by the New America Foundation last month. These efforts, the survey concludes, offer California an opportunity to ...

On the heels of news that Cubans would now be allowed to buy and sell used cars of any kind (they used to only be allowed to do so with the pre-1950’s era almendrones sputtering around the island), today Cuba announced that natural-born Cubans and permanent residents will now have the right to buy and sell their homes, and transfer ownership to others on the island.

Two years into economic recovery from the Great Recession, over 46 million Americans live in poverty, including 16 million children, according to the latest data released by the US Census Bureau. But beyond these staggering numbers, the report also clearly identifies a key investment opportunity that could produce higher incomes, lower rates of poverty, a more resilient labor force, and even higher tax revenue.

Florida International University has just released the results of a poll on Cuban American attitudes on Cuba and US policies (this is their tenth poll over the last twenty years). This latest FIU poll raises a lot of the big questions on the table right now and gets some contradictory answers.

As reasonable Cuba watchers were tearing our hair out over US envoy Bill Richardson's failed mission to Cuba, and growing increasingly despairing over the bitter tit-for-tat that followed, two fugitives from American justice were apprehended in Cuba and turned over to US marshals, who then escorted them back to New Jersey where they appeared in court on murder, kidnapping, and arson charges. The two stand accused of killing a 23 year-old man just over one year ago. New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez's press release thanking Cuban authorities for their cooperation is here (Just kidding).

When Rene Gonzalez, one of five Cuban agents reviled by Miami hardliners and celebrated by the Havana government and its supporters, walks out of a Miami prison today after serving 13 years of a 15 year sentence, where will he go and who will be there to greet him? This is a question someone in the Obama administration surely must have considered, because how they answer could cost them – and the Miami Dade Police Department – dearly.

“We're in the very nascent stages – just at the beginning of what it means to provide education to children at these ages,” says Lisa Guernsey, director of the Early Education Initiative at the New America Foundation. But, she hopes, this challenge ...

The third is a modified version of a plan offered by Marty Feldstein, Dan Feenberg, and Maya MacGuineas that would limit the value of deductions and credits to 2 percent of AGI. Let's take a look at each of them. The Obama plan would raise about $165 ...