...and the Labour Party's already at war with itself; what the IMF approval of China's currency means; and Congress agrees on a bill a whole three days before the deadline!
Britain's Parliament is set to vote Wednesday on whether to start bombing Syria — something Prime Minister David Cameron has wanted to do for some time, but is taking advantage of hawkish sentiments post-Paris to put up for a vote.
New Labour head Jeremy Corbyn passionately opposes the airstrikes. Most of his party's leadership — including its foreign-policy head — openly support them.
This fight and other recent statements on foreign policy from Corbyn and his allies — a Corbyn appointee blamed past Labour PM Tony Blair for the terrorist attacks that hit London in 2005, for example — reportedly have party members wondering whether they can toss Corbyn out.
In the meantime, David Cameron is taking advantage of the mishigas to say that you're either with him or with Corbyn — who he basically called a "terrorist sympathizer" today.
Under pressure, Corbyn has agreed that Labour members of Parliament will be allowed to vote however they like on airstrikes in Syria. Since plenty of Labour members had already voiced support, that means the resolution for war will almost certainly pass.
Corbyn's not dialing down the rhetoric. He accused his airstrike-supporting foreign-policy head, Hilary Benn, of being willing to kill innocent people.
But his actions — first alienating his party members, then allowing them to vote as they liked— have made the war he wanted to prevent all but certain.
Foreign policy foibles involving Labour MPs are as good a spur as any to watch Armando Iannucci's modern classic In the Loop. It basically predicts everything happening right now, only backwards.
The International Monetary Fund announced today that it's adding China's currency, the renminbi, to a prestigious group of major currencies called the Special Drawing Rights (or SDR) basket.
You might know China's currency as the yuan. The two mean slightly different things. Yuan is used for discrete amounts of money ("5 dollars," "5 yuan"), renminbi for the currency as a whole ("the dollar," "the renminbi").
In practical terms, this means very little to anyone. The Economist's article on the change leads with the fees for boats crossing the Suez Canal — because that's one of the very few financial transactions on earth that actually uses the SDR as a currency.
The SDR is mostly useful as a reserve currency in times of crisis, when it can supplement countries' individual currency reserves — like the financial crisis, for example.
The best argument that the renminbi's inclusion is that it solidifies China's role as a global economic powerhouse — and encourages continued investment in the country, in the same way the adoption of the dollar as a default currency both symbolized and helped America's rise in the early 20th century.
Paul Krugman thinks this is a silly argument. Rising economic powerhouses get investment because they're rising economic powerhouses, not because of how their currency is used.
Heck, Congress is feeling so functional lately that it might even pass a bill to fund the government for another year without threatening a shutdown first.
Rutland, VT used to have among the worst heroin problems of any city in America. Now it's recovering, thanks to an innovative policing strategy that "seeks to help troubled residents rather than simply build up arrest and incarceration numbers."
"Because no decision was reached in the fourth hearing of a case in which Aydın-based physician Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi was accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after sharing a meme comparing Erdoğan's facial expressions to the Gollum character in the The Lord of the Rings movies, a court has demanded an expert examination to investigate Gollum's character to decide whether a comparison with him is an insult."
