Only in Italy could a government crisis get mixed up in the politics of opera.The Financial Times has been all over an ongoing spat at Milan’s renowned opera house, La Scala. To sum up the situation, next year is the bicentennial of arguably the two greatest names in opera: Wagner and Verdi. La Scala, which is […]

GOP contrarians like Bob Corker argue that House Republicans should agree to higher taxes on the wealthy, the Wall Street Journal reports: Sen. Corker said that if the GOP grants Mr. Obama the tax increase, they can then use the looming vote on raising the debt ceiling to force cuts to entitlement programs. Mr. Corker did […]

Egypt’s President Morsi has given the army permission to arrest civilians, Reuters reports: A decree issued by Mursi late on Sunday gives the armed forces the power to arrest civilians and refer them to prosecutors until the announcement of the results of the referendum, which the protesters want cancelled.This might be important, as several groups […]

Boris Johnson, mayor of London, just jumped on the fracking train: Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion – more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being […]

From time to time, Via Meadia has pointed to a long-standing problem in higher education: finding an objective measure of how much a student has learned. College grades and course credits are fungible, relative measures that don’t necessarily tell us anything about what’s inside a student’s head.So we’re pleased to see a New York Times […]

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal visited Gaza for the first time since 1967 yesterday. Speaking to thousands of flag-waving supporters, Meshaal doubled down on Hamas’s solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one state, no Jews: First of all, Palestine—from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, from its north to its south—is our land, our right, and […]

FEMA is still picking up the pieces from Hurricane Sandy more than a month after the storm hit New York City. Although most of the city has returned to normal, federal disaster employees continue to find distressed people, often the elderly and disabled, trapped in apartments in the farthest corners of the city. Federal and city […]

The Game of Thrones is entering what promises to be an even more dramatic phase. The Philippines announced yesterday that its government would welcome a change to Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution as a counterbalance to China: “We would welcome that very much,” Albert del Rosario told the Financial Times in an interview. “We are looking […]

As we’ve written before, Via Meadia wishes ill on nobody, even demagogic thugs who have undermined democracy and done their best to drag their part of this world into a nightmare of corruption and poverty, whatever their intentions. So when we hear the news that Hugo Chavez is once again in Cuba for medical reasons, […]

Saudi Arabia is diving deep into the renewable energy world. The FT has the story: People in Egypt and even Europe could one day turn on their lights with electricity transmitted from the vast bank of solar power stations that Saudi Arabia aims to build in coming years, according to a senior Saudi official and […]