One of the advantages of extended overseas traveling in an election year is that you get to see just how pointless most of the daily election commentary and news reporting in the United States really is. The interminable US presidential election cycle (with people already beginning to speculate about 2016, heaven help us) has bequeathed […]

As regular followers of Via Meadia will know, WRM recently returned from his trip to India. He and AI staffer Peter Mellgard took photos while traveling.

A public notary in Brazil is attempting to push Brazil across a new frontier in family arrangements by “accepting a civil union between three people”, reports the BBC: Public Notary Claudia do Nascimento Domingues has said the man and two women should be entitled to family rights.[…]Nathaniel Santos Batista Junior, a jurist who helped draft […]

An article in the Financial Times illustrates an important theme we follow here at Via Meadia: the geopolitical and economic shifts as the new energy realities of the 21st century sink in.As the FT puts it, Experts are convinced that Tamar and Leviathan will not be the last big Israeli discoveries. They point to the […]

Most of us take a pretty simple and straightforward view of economic conditions: expansions are good and recessions are bad. But the reality is more complicated. More than 300 years of capitalism have taught us a few things. One of them is that recessions are a normal part of the business cycle. You have winter […]

Many observers noted that the use of the Stuxnet worm against Iran’s nuclear program opened a new era in warfare. They were correct; cyberwar is real and it can and will change the way the world works.The BBC carries a report that makes it official: we and our allies aren’t the only people with the […]

If the rest of the world wants to know how to build transportation infrastructure, America’s metropolitan transit supervisors give them a pretty good idea of what not to do. On both sides of the country, transportation bureaucrats are demonstrating that they never fail to projects which cost too much and take too long. Bloomberg names […]

Cairo is seeing a wave of sexual harassment, underscoring EU and UN reports showing that nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women at some point in their lives. (Only 2.4 percent of females report these incidents to the police.)The good news is that volunteer groups have formed to patrol Cairo’s downtown […]

I think we all know how this story turns out in the end: Some of the earliest fossils of pre-historic arthropods – dating to about 230 million years ago – have been discovered entombed in amber, PNAS journal reports. […]After a painstaking screen of more than 70,000 droplets, Prof Grimaldi and his team discovered three ancient arthropods […]

Have Iran sanctions finally gone too far? Desperate nerds from all over Iran deluged message boards and online forums earlier this week with pleas for help: World of Warcraft, the popular electronic game, had cut them off, reportedly in order to “tighten up” its parent company’s compliance with U.S. sanctions.It’s not clear that the Iranian […]