Oil began flowing from fields in Iraqi Kurdistan to Turkey over the weekend. The recently completed pipeline connects fields in Northern Iraq with Turkey’s pipeline network for the first time, and is being welcomed by both Ibril and Ankara alike, which are both happy to see less oil transported by costlier trucks. But while Turkey and the KRG both stand to benefit from an increasingly robust pipeline network, Baghdad is understandably alarmed by the development.

A recent paper found that people with insurance use health care more than people without, but aren’t significantly healthier. This study echoes another done earlier this year on the Oregon Medicaid population. Taken together, they suggest that insurance can have an inflationary effect on medical spending without producing proportionately better health outcomes.That doesn’t mean that we should give up on the goal of expanding access to at least some basic forms of insurance to the whole population, but it does point out the costs of the way we currently fund health care.

Arriving in Bangui, the capital of the Central African Republic, on Thursday morning, Samantha Powers offered “a blunt and simple” message: “the US is watching.” Her presence there probably doesn’t mean much to the citizens of a country reeling from violent revolution, counter-revolution, and brutal attacks by machete-wielding militias; CAR leaders have been calling for increased international attention to the conflict for weeks now, with little effect. Powers’ trip, the New York Times reports, raises the question: “What, exactly, is the United States willing to do to stop Christians and Muslims here from killing one another, and how much is it willing to spend?” The answer, it seems, is “not much.”

Months of furor over the NSA’s surveillance program have come to a head: a panel of advisors appointed by President Obama to make recommendations on reforming the NSA have released their report. We don’t necessarily endorse all the details of how that balance is struck here, but it looks like the authors of the report got the broad principles right. What’s needed, in both the NSA specifically and digital privacy more generally, is “ordered liberty” that reflects the ordered liberty we apply to the rest of American life.

The US economy may soon be able to take off the training wheels. When investors celebrated rather than mourned the Fed’s first, tentative step to cut its Quantitative Easing program, it was a sign that investors think growing strength can offset the impact of reduced Federal Reserve bond purchases. This is not only a good sign for the US, but a good sign for the world.

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.