If Obamacare is not settled law, but continually in the process of being settled, it will become harder for the law’s proponents to treat any attempts to change it as affronts to some untouchable consensus.

While U.S. and EU diplomats quarrel over niceties in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is surreptitiously gaining hold on countries ever farther west. A deal approved in Hungary’s parliament last week makes it quite clear that Putin wishes to drape an invisible curtain across the European continent, imposing energy and economic dependence on those countries that fall under it. How western leaders respond to his challenge will be an important gut check.

Yesterday, U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman announced that America would be challenging India’s protectionist solar energy trade policies. It’s hard to play nice when it comes to solar energy.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan identified the latest conspirators that are out to sabotage his government: pornographers. The pro-government newspaper accused ‘porn lobby’ of instigating the violent protests in the wake of a new law that aims to control content on the internet.

In voting to restrict immigration, the Swiss joined a larger, Europe-wide trend of national electorates rejecting the EU, rebelling against the political establishment, and asserting their mastery over their own national fate. EU member states can’t hold similar referenda on the free movement of peoples within the Eurozone, of course. But what if they could?

It has been in vogue lately to compare China’s rise and its relations with other world powers to the relationships between Germany and Great Britain in the years preceding The Great War. Others counter with rival historical analogies. But debating specifics of these comparisons risks losing sight of a broader point about great power politics.

What the eulogies got wrong about Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Niger’s Interior Minister called on France and the United States to re-intervene in Libya to fight jihadist groups. The West, he went on, needs “to provide an after-sales service” to the countries in the region who are still dealing with the Libya afterparty. Not surprisingly, the French Foreign Minister’s response was: absolutely not.

For more than a decade, global surface temperatures have defied our best climate models by refusing to rise, even as we pump out unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases. A new study has a new explanation for why our models are getting it wrong: equatorial winds.

Something strange is happening in England: citizens are drinking less. What we’re seeing is a broadly re-moralized upper class and an increasingly Dickensian lower class, crushed by poverty, family breakdown, and drug/alcohol use.