It wasn’t long before the Israelis and Palestinians rained all over the State Department’s parade. Following the weekend’s welcome news that peace talks may resume, the two sides spent yesterday “play[ing] down…the prospects of their envoys meeting in Washington any time soon”, says Reuters: Palestinians said negotiations could not begin unless it was clear in advance that […]

An American Medical Association committee you’ve probably never heard of is enriching doctors at your expense. According to a new investigation by the Washington Post, the AMA designates one committee to determine how much doctors are paid for a given procedure or operation. This committee—at least somewhat unintentionally, it seems—regularly misreports the amount of time procedures […]

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that, despite “political and social dysfunction,” the fact is that “decline happens,” meaning the decline of Detroit is actually “just one of those things that happens now and then in an ever-changing economy.”That perspective is hard to square with the seemingly never-ending torrent of bad news from Detroit. The FT reported […]

[UPDATE: the decision to shut down oil production is already having political ramifications. According to state media, South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir fired his deputy president and his entire cabinet, and suspended his lead negotiator in talks with Sudan.]South Sudan just announced that it would begin shutting down production at its oil wells in response to […]

In dozens of booming Indian cities, low-income workers are finding new opportunities to own small apartments where their families can live safely, comfortably, and affordably. It all comes down to the emergence of long-term micro-finance lenders, coupled with developers who see opportunities at the bottom of the housing market. This could be transformational for India.“There […]

Scientists are still struggling to explain the slower-than-predicted global warming over the past decade. It’s a puzzle with enormous implications: we know that we’re emitting greenhouse gases in record quantities, and we know that these gases trap more of the sun’s heat, yet global surface temperatures are significantly lower than what our climate models predicted. […]

A new Washington Post-ABC News poll should have President Obama very nervous about the future of the Affordable Care Act. Moderate Democrats are turning against the ACA in record numbers. WaPo: Just after the law was passed in 2010, fully 74 percent of moderate and conservative Democrats supported the federal law making changes to the health-care system. […]

It turns out that the smart diplomats and strategery buffs in the White House have taken another look at the situation in Syria and reached a new conclusion: that Assad isn’t going anywhere after all. The Syrian civil war is going to drag murderously on into the indefinite future, jihadi groups will fester and multiply […]

A pair of recent studies on remote working illustrate both the growing support for and the outsized benefits of telework.First, the Washington Post published a study last month that found that the number of DC workers telecommuting at least once a week has nearly doubled since 2010. Though 55 percent of the 1,106 survey respondents […]

In a meeting with the Iraqi Minister for Antiquities and Tourism in Tehran on Sunday, Iran’s Foreign Minister emphasized their two countries’ close religious and cultural history and ever-closer political relationship. A day later, in Baghdad, Iran’s oil minister put pen to paper on a $15 billion deal to supply natural gas to Iraq’s beleaguered energy […]