A US non-profit warned the UK more than four years ago that many British hospitals were doing a terrible job caring for patients, according to a report released in the aftermath of the Stafford Hospital scandal. The Telegraph reports the UK’s Department of Health asked the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, then run by Obama’s former healthcare […]

Car use is falling in Auckland, New Zealand, and city planners around the world should start paying attention: New Geography thinks this could be a sign of things to come: The prospect of falling car use now needs to be firmly factored into planning for western cities.That may come as a bit of a surprise in light […]

Every year, Foreign Policy and the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto award the Lionel Gelber Prize for the year’s best foreign affairs book, and this year I’m one of the judges. They’ve just released the long list of titles in the running, which we’ve listed below with a link to their […]

France is now bombing the Sahara.When French and Malian forces captured the town of Kidal last week, Islamist militants lost control of the last major town in northern Mali. Yet the battle continues despite France’s success at capturing the cities as the militants have moved to the vast, empty mountains in the north. African and French […]

Smartphones may soon allow you to carry your very own portable health clinic right in your pocket. That’s the opinion of Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist convinced that smartphone technology is the future of medicine.One day Topol was flying to San Diego when another passenger started having bad chest pains. He hooked an AliveCor device onto his phone, […]

Norendra Modi, the wonder-governor of Gujarat, is making more moves on the Indian Prime Ministership. His latest bid to portray himself as a no-nonsense pro-business  leader, and to transcend the controversy surrounding his Hindu nationalist past, had him speaking to a business college in Delhi earlier this week. His reputation as a golden-tongued orator appears to […]

Putin is always looking for new ways to consolidate his power, and a well that never seems to run dry for him is the traditionally state-friendly Russian Orthodox Church. Patriarch Kirill I, the primate of the Church, recently celebrated the fourth anniversary of his leadership, and Putin took the opportunity to state his support for […]

Like Argentina, Venezuela is blessed with a superabundance of natural resources. And like Argentina, it is cursed with intellectuals and politicians whose ideas about how the world works are deeply at odds with reality. As a result, despite its oil riches Venezuela is saddled with ruinous inflation and has been forced to devalue its currency. […]

In twenty years, children might go to school in the few remaining malls. Thanks to online shopping, physical shops are closing all across the country, and the overbuilt mall industry is looking for ways to fill the space. FT reports: If the US is destined to lose more shops, mall owners need to get more […]

The map of America’s wealth is changing. With the exception of San Francisco, the cities that generated America’s prosperity and attracted its greatest talent for over a century are now losing out to cities that few outside the US know exist: Chicago, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles are losing significant ground while Austin, […]