Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan finds his cabinet in disarray after a police corruption probe resulted in the arrests of high-profile officials and their family members. Erdoğan responded swiftly last week by firing top police officials—at least 70 at last count—but it wasn’t enough to quell anger over government corruption. The political crisis deepened over the weekend as protests broke out and the police intervened with water cannons and tear gas. In response, Erdoğan went on the offensive.

We may one day be growing our oil. Researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) are pioneering a process that produces oil from algae in just one hour. Wet algae goes in, heat and pressure is applied, and crude oil comes out.

In an effort to cope with the student loan crisis, Senate Democrats have unveiled a plan to reduce the rate of student defaults by giving colleges more “skin in the game.” Essentially, the plan penalized universities with a large number of student defaults by forcing them to pay a fine to the feds. Giving colleges more accountability is a good thing, but this plan gives the federal government far more control over the market than we’re comfortable with.

Egypt’s military dealt a heavy blow to the liberal democracy movement that played a big role in toppling the Mubarak regime back in 2011. Three activist leaders—Ahmed Maher, Mohamed Adel and Ahmed Douma—were convicted of participating in recent protests and sentenced to three years in prison and fined thousands of dollars. “It is time to shut up, to stay quiet,” the director of the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information told the New York Times. “There is only one choice — to support the military or to be in jail.”

Brent crude hit a new two-week high at $112 a barrel as South Sudan’s troubles turned attention to Africa as an important pain point for the global oil trade. Combined with the losses in output in Nigeria and Libya, the shortfall in African oil is exceeding whatever extra oil was coming to market due to the US shale boom.

The American lust for driving has tapered off in recent years. Per-capita miles traveled is flagging after more than sixty years of solid growth, driven in large part by car-averse millenials, who traveled 23 percent fewer miles in 2009 than they did in 2001. The outlook for carmakers is grim: people are increasingly capable of working remotely, and more and more are choosing to kill their commute to work from home or some co-working space closer at hand. Meanwhile, the rest of us are spoiled for choice.

One of our regular contributors here at The American Interest, Saim Saeed, who earlier this month penned a review of Husain Haqqani’s recent memoir, also works for the Express Tribune in Karachi. Though you’re forgiven for not keeping up with Pakistani media, Saim’s editorial on his country’s penchant for euphemisms is a nice quick read this Sunday.

The Obama administration is doing everything it can to save the Affordable Care Act in advance of the December 23rd deadline to sign up for coverage, and the panic is showing. For weeks now the administration has been delaying provisions, tweaking standards, and exempting people from the law’s initial rules (e.g. here), and now it has delivered the coup de grace. The New York Times reports that people who have had their insurance cancelled will be exempt from any penalties for non-compliance with the individual mandate in the coming year.It’s still very unclear where all this is going to lead, but this is one the clearest signs of crisis we’ve seen yet from the administration.

Japan and India began second-ever joint military exercises in the Indian Ocean this week, a tangible step toward closer cooperation between China’s two biggest Asian rivals. The relationship between Tokyo and New Delhi is warming, but don’t expect Beijing to sit idly by.

The Office of Personnel Management (OPM) just submitted a report this week to Congress detailing the status of federal telework, and contained within were encouraging signs for the still-growing phenomenon. The number of federal employees with signed telework agreements—a prerequisite, according to the TEA, for working remotely—nearly doubled from 2011 to 2012. The number of employees considered telework-eligible increased a whopping 49 percent, and the number of federal workers actually teleworking jumped 24 percent. When it comes to telework, the private sector could learn a thing or two from the feds.