A surgery center in Oklahoma has started a bidding war by offering drastically lower prices than other providers and posting them online. The center describes itself as “free-market loving”—an unorthodox but welcome branding for a health care provider. The evidence of its success, however, is eye-popping. Where some hospitals charge more than $16,000 for a breast biopsy, […]

Walter Russell Mead has brought to my attention that a Turkish colleague we know, Mustafa Akyol, indirectly and, as it turns out, unfairly, implicated me as a coup-lover and disparager of Islam in a Hurriyet column he wrote recently called “How one can defend Egypt’s Coup.” Actually, Akyol was not attacking me but rather taking […]

The public pensions crisis is one of the greatest challenges facing the states today, but thus far it has mostly met with silence from Washington. This may be about to change. Mary Williams Walsh, who has been all over the pensions story for the New York Times, is now reporting that Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah […]

by Jamie HorganFirst, a grainy image of a hose on fire; next, a slow shot of verdant, rain-drenched woods. That’s how Josh Fox’s documentary film Gasland II opens, and it encapsulates his vision of the two sides of the fracking debate: those who seek to destroy nature, and those who defend it. What follows is […]

Europe’s biggest oil companies, Shell and BP, are floundering in the green energy department. Both companies have decided to stop funding their advanced biofuel programs, which produced fuel from woody plants and waste, due to their high production costs. These biofuels require intense capital investment, but haven’t begun yielding much profit, and the oil companies […]

China has become increasingly belligerent and North Korea increasingly threatening, the Japanese government reported in its annual defense paper today.China has been engaged in “dangerous actions that could cause a contingency situation,” the report warns, and “has attempted to change the status quo by force based on its own assertion, which is incompatible with the […]

Speaking of failed states, California’s prison system is dysfunctional and broken. Earlier this year, a Federal Appeals Court found that the state had yet to comply with the Supreme Court’s 2011 ruling that conditions in its prison system amount to “cruel and unusual punishment.” The three-judge Appeals Court panel issued a stern rebuke to Governor […]

If Detroit were a country, it would fit comfortably into the Failed States Index. The NYT’s front-page analysis today asserts that the city’s daily struggle to survive is worse than the estimated $18 billion in debt, worse than the potential fire sale of the city’s art, its parks, and its airports. Detroit’s residents can no longer count […]

The Chinese Ministry of Agriculture banned Chinese fishing boats from operating near North Korea today, another sign of a deteriorating relationship.Apparently North Korea requested that all Chinese trawlers buy North Korean fuel instead of making their own arrangements. The Chinese authorities protested that this would “severely compromise the normal operations and safety of Chinese vessels,” according to the […]

It seems like a story right out of a science fiction novel. Texas doctors will soon remotely preform operations on patients in China…using robots. Quartz: The Shenzhen People’s Hospital in China and the Methodist Hospital in Houston have agreed to work together to allow surgical operations to be performed remotely using advanced robotics, reports the Shenzhen Economic […]