The ever-prescient Joel Kotkin has a great essay on Vietnam over at the American. Vietnam, Kotkin suggests, has not only grown into an important player in the geopolitical competition under way in Asia but is emerging as one of Asia’s most promising economies: This combination of a growing and skilled workforce represents the same combination […]

More warning signs from Argentina: The WSJ reports: A recent flurry of government measures to restrain foreign currency purchases haven’t succeeded in stemming a slow but steady drain on the central bank’s dollar reserves, making Argentine savers even more uneasy in the process.As it tries to prop up the peso, the Central Bank has been losing […]

Is it the second coming of Bill Clinton? President Obama seems to be embracing Clinton’s strategy of using popular but insignificant government actions to bolster his image and appeal to bipartisanship in the lead up to 2012.On Tuesday, it was stricter oversight of the Head Start preschool program for low-income children. On Wednesday, Obama signed […]

Here’s one green initiative Via Meadia supports: tackling the global problem of overfishing. The depletion of key species threatens the global food supply (and a vital source of protein for the poor) and given the speed at which overfished species can collapse it is the single most urgent environmental problem before us. As the NYT […]

Did Qaddafi die to save Assad and Ahmadinejad? It certainly looks like China and Russia regret allowing NATO to bomb Libya. Too much Western meddling in the Middle East has not made either of the two Security Council veto wielders happy. They will not repeat their mistake in Syria or Iran.NATO intervened in Libya to […]

The crisis in the EU has moved through several stages.  In the initial stage, it was a crisis of small peripheral economies: Ireland, Portugal, Greece.  The question then was whether the crisis would spread from the small fry to Spain. If it was a small fry problem, Europe could solve it with the back of […]

Some greens don’t feel they are living unless they are crying “Wolf!”  The lastest wolfspotting call comes from the authors of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook, who warn us that the year 2017 is the deadline for radically overhauling our energy-producing infrastructure before the chance to stop harmful climate change will “be lost […]

The word in the asphalt jungle is that Coca-Cola intervened and blocked a plan to ban bottled water in Grand Canyon National Park. The NYT has the story: Stephen P. Martin, the architect of the [bottle ban] plan and the top parks official at the Grand Canyon, said his superiors told him two weeks before […]

Via Meadia is always interested in taking the pulse on the Anglosphere and today the pulse is strong. The latest news in the Great Game is that the United States will be establishing permanent naval operations in Australia. The WSJ reports: President Barack Obama will announce an accord for a new and permanent U.S. military […]

American universities and (especially) their fundraising networks are the envy of the world. The past few years have seen a number of universities attempt to mimic the American fundraising spirit. For some pointers, perhaps they should look to Penn State, where students’ school passion has led to a riot. The New York Times reports: After […]