Germany has started the year off with a bang. German exports and manufacturing are booming, and two ministers in Angela Merkel’s new cabinet took public pot shots at key Western allies. Germany has emerged as the top power in Europe, and they want to make sure everyone knows it.

The dispute between India and the United States over an Indian diplomat’s “mistreatment” at the hands of U.S. police is getting worse. Yesterday, India requested that the U.S. embassy in Delhi stop commercial activities at a well-known club that has a bowling alley and swimming pool and other amenities. The Indian authorities also said that U.S. vehicles would not be immune to traffic offenses anymore. Then the U.S. energy minister, after a “conversation with Indian counterparts,” canceled a planned trip to India, becoming the second American official to postpone a visit there.

Fighting between rival rebel groups in Syria over the past few days may offer the United States that rarest of opportunities: a second chance. The al-Qaeda-allied ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which just a week ago controlled a wide swathe of territory in northern and eastern Syria, is reeling from a campaign against it by less extreme rebels.

Even Obamacare’s main defenders are starting to look in the right places for real health care reform. Ezra Klein has a great column diagnosing what the single payer pivot gets wrong about insurance, in which he notes that it’s not the diversity of insurers per se that cause high costs in the United States. Most European countries with more nationalized health care systems, after all, don’t have just one payer. Rather, it’s that, relative to health care providers, insurance companies are too weak in the the U.S. system.

Late last year, it looked like China may have been slowly backing away from its one-child policy. Not so fast. This week, Zhang Yimou, arguably China’s most famous director, will face a massive $1.24 million fine for fathering multiple children without approval from the authorities following a public uproar.

A Massachusetts health care commission has found that one-third of state health care spending is wasted on inefficient medical procedures. One of the biggest talking points for health care reform is that the US spends much more on health care than other countries, but has worse health statistics, and the financial waste in our system is always identified as a big cause of our inflated spending. But if Massachusetts is any evidence, we’re no closer to reducing systemic waste in a post-ACA world than we were before

Germany produced more energy more coal last year than the ostensibly green-minded country has in nearly a quarter century. King Coal’s return comes courtesy of Germany’s reactionary energiewende—its turn towards green energy—put in place following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. The plan was to phase out the country’s numerous nuclear reactors and jump-start its fledgling renewable energy industry, but coal is having to fill the gap.

Oscar Niemeyer’s architectural vision needed the support of authoritarian governments.

Step by step, China is extending its control of disputed waters in the South China Sea. A new rule took effect this month that requires foreign fishermen operating in almost two thirds of the entire Sea, including areas claimed and controlled by neighboring countries, to identify themselves to the Chinese authorities.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates’ new memoir provides an inside look at foreign policy in the Bush and Obama eras, but it is far more than a set of partisan talking points.