For the first time, a Chinese warplane has flown through international airspace between the disputed Senkaku Islands and Okinawa. Japan scrambled its own fighter jets in response. To make matters even more interesting, just yesterday Chinese ships completed an entire circuit of the Japanese archipelago, passing for the first time through La Pérouse Strait which separates […]

Ever since the ouster of Mohammed Morsi, Egypt’s military has been wreaking havoc on the lives of Palestinians in Gaza. The 1.7 million residents of the Gaza Strip rely heavily on trade through a network of tunnels on the Egyptian border for their livelihood. But with the Muslim Brotherhood out of power, the Egyptian military […]

Yesterday we reported on the strange, perverse way a little-known AMA committee has been artificially inflating the payment doctors receive for common procedures. Today the Washington Post has some good news: a bipartisan group is working to fix the problem, and yesterday House subcommittee approved a draft of a bill that aims to do it. […]

Steven Rattner is calling for a bailout of Detroit. No one likes bailouts or the prospect of rewarding Detroit’s historic fiscal mismanagement. But apart from voting in elections, the 700,000 remaining residents of the Motor City are no more responsible for Detroit’s problems than were the victims of Hurricane Sandy for theirs, and eventually Congress […]

With 12 dead and 86 wounded in Cairo on Tuesday, the highest casualty toll since July 8 when the army opened fire on Muslim Brotherhood protesters and killed 62, a quick return to normalcy for Egypt after Morsi is looking increasingly unlikely. The NY Times has the grim details: The clashes, which flared in several Cairo […]

It wasn’t long before the Israelis and Palestinians rained all over the State Department’s parade. Following the weekend’s welcome news that peace talks may resume, the two sides spent yesterday “play[ing] down…the prospects of their envoys meeting in Washington any time soon”, says Reuters: Palestinians said negotiations could not begin unless it was clear in advance that […]

An American Medical Association committee you’ve probably never heard of is enriching doctors at your expense. According to a new investigation by the Washington Post, the AMA designates one committee to determine how much doctors are paid for a given procedure or operation. This committee—at least somewhat unintentionally, it seems—regularly misreports the amount of time procedures […]

Paul Krugman wrote yesterday that, despite “political and social dysfunction,” the fact is that “decline happens,” meaning the decline of Detroit is actually “just one of those things that happens now and then in an ever-changing economy.”That perspective is hard to square with the seemingly never-ending torrent of bad news from Detroit. The FT reported […]

[UPDATE: the decision to shut down oil production is already having political ramifications. According to state media, South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir fired his deputy president and his entire cabinet, and suspended his lead negotiator in talks with Sudan.]South Sudan just announced that it would begin shutting down production at its oil wells in response to […]

In dozens of booming Indian cities, low-income workers are finding new opportunities to own small apartments where their families can live safely, comfortably, and affordably. It all comes down to the emergence of long-term micro-finance lenders, coupled with developers who see opportunities at the bottom of the housing market. This could be transformational for India.“There […]