Having spun an artificial Afghan state into existence, we can’t leave without it crashing into the ground.

You can’t consume an education; you can only earn it.

When the IRS takes a budgetary and political beating, the entire country ultimately feels the pain.

Control the vocabulary of a public policy debate, and you control the debate.

The EU is officially investigating Germany’s green policies to determine if they violate the bloc’s competition rules. On Wednesday the European Commission announced it was opening a probe of Merkel’s policy of exempting her country’s most energy-intensive firms from green surcharges tacked on to electricity bills to subsidize the cost of expensive renewables.

After weeks of almost daily PR disasters for the Obama administration, the travails of the Affordable Care Act have receded from headlines—and some of the current reports are even modestly positive. What’s going on? Last-minute maneuvers by the White House, coupled with the fact that it will take time for many of the law’s provisions to work themselves out, have given the Obama administration a respite from the 24/7 criticism. That respite could be interpreted at any time by unexpected bad news, or it could be the new status quo for the Affordable Care Act. But based on the data we currently have, it still looks like the next shoe will drop on January 1, and another wave of negative coverage will follow.

Two polls show a California at odds with itself: voters look to be seriously souring on labor unions, but a majority might also be opposed to the state’s most promising effort to reform public pension plans. If the polls are accurate, there may be a certain logic to this: voters in the Golden State acknowledge the strain labor unions are putting on state and local finances, but don’t think union members should be the ones to suffer. Either way, a debate has finally begun in a blue state that desperately needs one.

Before voting began in Delhi’s state-assembly election earlier this month, one of the leaders of the Aam Aadmi (“Common Man”) Party, an upstart anti-corruption organization in India, told a journalist, off the record, that he didn’t expect much initial success. Ten percent of the vote would be enough, Yogendra Yadav said to Samanth Subramanian, who relates this story in the New Yorker. “I’ve seen too many vote-share tables in my life to expect miracles,” Yadav laughed. After the votes were counted in Delhi, it emerged that the AAP had won a stunning 28 seats, just three short of Narendra Modi’s BJP. Building on that spectacular success the AAP announced today that it would contest all 26 national parliament seats in Modi’s home state of Gujarat. Arvind Kejriwal, AAP’s outspoken leader, is now a man to watch in Indian politics.

New Delhi, much like Beijing, is currently laboring under a cloud of toxic smog. Smog is proving a costly and resilient challenge to both India and China, and is a very tangible byproduct of rapid industrialization. Hastening the transition to an information economy could clear the skies of both BRICs members.

Egypt’s state prosecutor today accused former president Mohamed Morsi and thirty four Islamists of a range of crimes including conspiring with foreign groups to commit terrorist acts inside Egypt and divulging military secrets to foreign regimes. The accused could be executed for these crimes. The prosecutor called it “the biggest case of conspiracy in the history of Egypt.”