The dispute between India and the United States over the arrest of an Indian diplomat in New York is more complicated than it looks. The tiny Indian Foreign Service (just 1,750 people) is an elite body of carefully selected, extremely well-trained and very intelligent career civil servants. The IFS faces some problems, though. First, it is so small that it has a hard time managing India’s growing international portfolio. Second, as Indian politics becomes more populist, life gets harder for the elite bureaucracies, including the foreign ministry, who ruled the roost in India’s post-independence era.

Another day, another California city drowning in pension debt. This time, the city is Desert Hot Springs, a small community just outside the Los Angeles area, which is now sitting on the edge of bankruptcy due to a history of unrealistic revenue estimates and generous pension promises to public workers.

Chicago’s attempts to address its pension crisis show an ugly picture of blue failure and the fracturing of the coalitions that so long gave the blue model political dominance. Blue pols who rose to power on blue principles are now increasingly alienated from the blue constituents who put them in power. But even more importantly, the constituents themselves are now divided against each other, because the pension crisis pits the interests of providers of government services against the recipients of those services.

From the time of General Nasser, the Egyptian military’s core competence has been crushing the Muslim Brotherhood — for 60 years its most powerful rival. Killing some leaders, imprisoning others, keeping still others on a very short leash as the representatives of a quasi-legal political movement: this is what the Egyptian army and its police allies in the interior ministry know how to do, and since Mohamed Morsi’s downfall they appear to be doing it very effectively once again.

The world is getting used to horrendous bomb attacks and tens of millions of people now live in countries where terror aimed at innocent civilians has become almost a normal tool of politics. It is easy to become callous and indifferent to daily reports of dozens killed by these methods, and to accept the unacceptable as the new normal. That tendency needs to be fought against, and whether the murders take place in Bagdad, the Sinai, Syria or Volgograd, we should fight the tendency to turn the victims into statistics.

The numbers are in: after numerous extensions, exemptions, and delays, about two million people signed up for insurance in state and federal exchanges by the December 24th deadline. What kind of health care experience will those two million people have? The WSJ reports that people who bought new insurance on the exchange are flocking to providers to make use of their old coverage before it expires. Whatever you think about the benefits of networks restrictions generally in lowering costs, the particular way the ACA is pushing people into smaller networks will ensure that the law will continue getting bad press far into the future, fixed website or not.

At the same time it was reforming its pension plans for teachers, Puerto Rico was also borrowing money from its own public employee retirement funds to plug a hole in its budget. Is Puerto Rico going the way of Argentina?

The American Interest is operating on a skeleton crew this late December week as we all spend time with our families all across the country and around the world. Here’s what you might’ve missed this week if you too were spending less time online.

Wether you’re looking at figures for murder or GDP growth, if they come from the Argentinian government they’re probably false. Buenos Aires has a tradition of inflating statistics. This wouldn’t matter too much if the statistics in question weren’t so badly disguised, so habitually, by the government, or if those statistics didn’t have knock-on effects for Argentinian citizens.

Team Obama is making moves against disability fraud, which has ballooned under its watch during the recent economic downturn. This weekend, the Social Security Administration will improve oversight over 1,500 administrative law judges who had been awarding or denying benefits as they liked. A smart move, but a sign of serious trouble for Social Security.