Despite the election of a pious president, Egypt appears to be running out of money to pay its fuel import bills. That’s the news from this Reuters story, which reports that after payment delays and other hiccups, banks and other lenders have been pulling back from Egypt and that the resulting funds shortage is forcing […]

Playing with the school year apparently isn’t the only way schools are looking to game national rankings systems. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that Georgia’s high school graduation rate just fell from 81 percent to 67 percent in one year. The steep drop-off is explained by changes in federal rules for reporting dropouts. Under the old rules, […]

According to the Financial Times, a new report from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office says that its original calculations of the impact of the fiscal cliff significantly understated the risks and the situation is  far worse than it thought: The US will be plunged into recession next year if Congress fails to strike a deal […]

During a visit to Cairo in late July, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta praised the relationship between newly elected President Mohamed Morsi and Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the longtime Defense Minister who had ruled Egypt after Hosni Mubarak’s fall from power. Ten days ago, Morsi radically changed that relationship, announcing the retirement of Tantawi […]

The latest sign that China’s economy is slowing dramatically? A plunge in the price of steel and iron ore. The Financial Times has the numbers: Hot rolled steel, an industry benchmark, traded at Rmb3,562 ($560) a tonne this week, having tumbled 19 per cent since April to its lowest level in almost three years.The collapse […]

With Coursera and MIT’s EdX programs paving the way, more colleges are jumping into the world of online learning. The project, known as a “massive open online course,” or “MOOC”, is profiled in the NYT: The mechanical MOOC will not be as tightly structured as the free courses now offered by leading universities like Harvard, Berkeley, […]

As the dust settles after the Pussy Riot show trial and the world of fair-weather activists moves on to the next fashionable Twitter-fueled cause, Via Meadia awaits some kind of definitive polling to tell us how Russians perceived the verdict.The Levada Center, a reliable non-governmental polling agency, did perform several polls in the runup to […]

Yesterday we reported that Japan’s Ambassador to China would be replaced, in a hardening of Japan’s stance in the Senkaku/Diaoyu dispute. Japan is now also replacing its ambassadors to South Korea and the United States as well, completely retooling its diplomacy. The Daily Yomiuri has the story: The government plans to appoint Vice Foreign Minister […]

If Congress fails to reach agreement on a deficit reduction plan (which looks increasingly likely), automatic budget cuts—to the tune of $1.2 trillion—will kick in on January 2, 2013. The cuts may become a key issue for voters in northern Virginia, whose jobs depend on government contracts, and there is an interesting partisan twist. Defense […]

Science never ceases to amaze. George Church and Sri Kosuri of Harvard’s Wyss Institute have managed to pack about a thousand times more data into DNA than ever before, reports ExtremeTech. The bioengineer and geneticist recently encoded about 5.5 petabits (about 700,000 gigabytes, to use a more familiar unit) of data in a single gram of […]