Two reports by leading reporters at the country’s best newspapers offer new research on what happened that night at the US mission in Benghazi, but the partisan flack being thrown around in the wake of these new revelations is mostly besides the point.

A new survey in Health Affairs that found a group of 503 surgeons were only able to guess the cost of implantable medical devices 21 percent of the time. This is especially relevant because a lot of health care reforms place their hope in the ability of providers to economize on care on behalf of the patient—many reform ideas include incentives designed to encourage doctors to pass on savings to the patients. But if the doctors themselves don’t know the costs involved, they can’t be expected to make good decisions about price/quality tradeoffs.

South Sudan is teetering on the brink of a civil war, but peace talks may be making progress in Ethiopia today, and China may be the one to thank.

Here’s a novel solution to the caregiver crunch accompanying the graying of the West: Some Europeans are sending their elderly relations to nursing homes in other countries where the care is cheaper. Packing the elderly off to other countries might be better than putting them on ice floes, but but it still seems less than ideal for them to be so far from family when they are at their most frail and increasingly debilitated. If any kind of Boomer displacement is necessary to reduce health care costs, it would be much better for the “young old” to go abroad voluntarily and enjoy a good life on the cheap while they are still relatively mobile and independent. Either way, expect a lot more strange stuff like this to appear as the elderly population rises, especially in those countries with the biggest demographic bulges.

California Governor Jerry Brown is entering an election year with one of his biggest pet projects in serious trouble. In November, two court decisions made it considerably more difficult for the state to raise money for the high-speed rail project and tied up the construction in environmental red tape. On its own, this may not pose a serious long-term threat to the program, but public opinion is turning against it as well. If this becomes a hot issue again, it could be one of the few major weakness in Brown’s potential reelection campaign.

Turkey’s political crisis took a dark turn this week. Photos of Prime Minister Erdoğan’s son meeting a suspected al-Qaeda financier in an Istanbul hotel were leaked to the press. If these reports hold any water, Erdoğan could be in serious trouble.

China’s efforts to reduce its horrific pollution are creating a new problem: fraud. To clear its smoggy skies, China put in place incentives for power plants to reduce air pollution, but many plants cheated that system by claiming to have cut down on their emissions without actually doing anything. Now the Chinese government is having to crack down on these swindling power producers.

For the fourth year in a row, the rate at which health care costs are growing has slowed down. But this time it’s extra-special because for the first time new data also finds that health care costs shrunk as a percentage of the economy in 2012. ACA supporters have jumped on these trends as the latest piece of evidence that the law is working well (e.g. this op-ed at the WSJ).

Yesterday we reported that Detroit Emergency Manager Kevyn Orr had frozen the pensions of city employees while replacing their defined-benefit plans with a 401(k)-style defined contribution plan. But only hours after the decision was made known to the public, Orr abruptly reversed course, planning to delay the freeze until bankruptcy negotiations with the city’s retirement funds play themselves out.

Puerto Rico now has another problem on top of its ravaged finances and poor credit rating: citizens are fleeing the island in droves. Since the year 2000, Puerto Rico has lost nearly 300,000 people to the mainland—a large number of an island with a population of 3.6 million—and the exodus is only speeding up, with an average of 54,000 leaving the island over the past few years. And with the unemployment rate hovering near 15 percent, nearly double that of the mainland, the trend shows few signs of reversing.