A senior Republican in the Senate wants the country to think long and hard about the decades old ban on exporting unrefined US crude oil. Senator Lisa Murkowski, who is on the Senate Energy Committee, said today the ban causes disruptions does little to keep U.S. prices stable.

It’s a grim time to be in the bee business as American honeybees are dying at an alarming rate due to what’s called colony collapse disorder. No one is certain what’s behind the collapse, but the problem has become so severe it’s gotten the attention of big business.

The best hope for U.S. job growth to take off in coming years might be through entrepreneurship. While it’s true that startups fail at a high rate, when they succeed, they can be engines for rapid job growth, often in highly skilled jobs that pay above-average wages. Metropolitan areas that are centers of startup activity also tend to have lower unemployment than the national average.