Via Meadia has always enjoyed the hospitality of Australia, teeming though it and its surrounding waters may be with various venomous or otherwise disagreeable creatures eager to do you harm.But the country, often referred to as Oz, is more than just a holiday destination. It boasts the 13th largest economy in the world and has […]

Reading the New York Times at breakfast is more than a habit. It is a sort of addiction. One experiences withdrawal symptoms in places where the paper is not available (especially when the only alternative is USA Today). At least in this country, the Times has no serious rival for good international news coverage, by […]

The battle against the blue model is heating up in deep-blue Rhode Island. Via Meadia has already covered the struggle at the state level, but the fight is increasingly trickling down to the municipal level as well. The New York Times is reporting that Providence Mayor Angel Taveras, a Democrat, is planning to embark on […]

Now that the Obama White House has lost that shiny, new-president feel, and hope and change has turned into more of the same, gridlock is back in Washington and fury beyond the Beltway. With the distinctly uninspiring prospect of an Obama-Romney battle stretching endlessly across an infinite series of news cycles all the way to […]

Rescuers are still searching for scores of missing people after a ferry broke apart and sunk in bad weather crossing the Brahmaputra River in India’s northeastern Assam province on Monday. More than one hundred have been confirmed dead already.Indian authorities have been skimping on infrastructure maintenance for years. In Assam and elsewhere, dilapidated roads and nonexistent […]

It’s May Day, that great holiday of the international communist movement, and news comes from Miami that two young actors have joined more than a million other Cubans in fleeing the Castro dictatorship to the United States.Twenty-year-old actors Javier Nunez Florian and Anallin de la Rua were allowed out by the Cuban government to publicize […]

Iceland was a poster child for the kind of crazy speculative real-estate-fueled boom-and-bust that characterized the 2008 crash around the developed world. Now Reuters is reporting that Iceland is on the mend. How did it do it? Part of it was due to the blessing of being a relatively small economy not directly tethered to […]

The Turkish Press responded en masse to this year’s annual commemoration of the 1915 massacres of Armenians perpetrated by the Ottoman imperial government. According to their ideological sympathies, newspapers noted and criticized statements like those from Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, as well as advertisements published in the New York Times and the International Herald […]

One year has passed since American commandos raided a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, killing Osama bin Laden. On this anniversary, the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project released a study, conducted over the past month or so, that found that across the Middle East’s Muslim populations Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda are hugely unpopular.The poll asked Muslims […]

Treating that killer migraine could become a lot easier, and a lot cheaper, if a new FDA proposal is adopted. The proposal, which is still under review, would allow patients to purchase over-the-counter drugs for common conditions that previously required a prescription—and with it, a costly trip to the doctor’s office. The Washington Times has the […]