Here’s an idea whose time might be coming: think-tankers in Canada and Australia are looking at ways the two countries may cooperate as Canada increasingly turns its focus towards Asia and the Pacific. A joint report from Canada’s CIGI and the Australian Strategic Policy Institute lays out the rationale: For a long time, both countries’ […]

It sounds strange, but it’s true: marriage could be a important part of finding a cure for cancer. A new study in the Journal of Clinical Oncology finds that married cancer patients are 20 percent more likely than unmarried cancer patients to beat the disease. NBC News has more: The study also found that guys seem […]

As Detroit went bankrupt, we asked whether Obama would do anything about the failure of the city whose main industry he bailed out five years ago. It’s taken a few months, but it looks like he has a plan: the Los Angeles Times reports that the Obama administration is moving to send $300 million in funds […]

China’s state-owned oil company, CNOOC, won a $2 billion contract to develop the Kingfisher oil field in Uganda on Wednesday. Due to its rapidly increasing demand for energy, China has been indiscriminately looking for ways to secure its oil needs, with a focus on resource-rich African nations. Reuters reports on the deal:  Uganda, which struck […]

China has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad water problem. A recent water census discovered that 28,000 rivers have disappeared over the past two decades. The country’s per capita water resources are just one quarter of the world average. Shockingly, forty percent of what little water China does have is too toxic for humans […]

According to its defenders, Accountable Care Organizations are among Obamacare’s greatest cost-saving measures. In theory, ACOs control costs by allowing providers to keep some of the savings they create when they deliver care more cheaply than other providers. But in practice, the results have been unconvincing.The WSJ has a long-form, informative piece on the successes and failures of […]

The impending Congressional showdown over Obamacare and the federal budget has set the chattering classes ablaze all week, yet as with the Iran story, we’ve chosen to remain mostly silent on the topic. To us, it seems like a lot of noise rather than signal. This battle has much more to do with the big […]

The historic phone call between President Obama and Iranian President Rouhani has been the biggest foreign policy story of the week, yet we have remained relatively silent on the issue. The truth is that we have been waiting for the dust to settle before taking a view, because there are a few different ways to look […]

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is looking into reports that solar energy facilities are blinding, burning, maiming, and killing birds. A number of dead birds have turned up near solar facilities this summer, and the BLM wants answers. E&E News reports: At project sites like the Ivanpah plant, which uses thousands of heliostat mirrors to reflect […]

Interesting news from Mars: it appears that the red planet’s dusty outer layer is 2 percent water by weight. The BBC talked to a scientist involved with NASA’s Discovery Rover project: “If you think about a cubic foot of this dirt and you just heat it a little bit – a few hundred degrees – […]