Both American and Chinese officials have slammed the release of the Pentagon’s “Air-Sea Battle”—a war-planning document focusing on China—as damaging to U.S.-China relations. The criticism centers around concerns that the plan, which models potential scenarios for a future war between the U.S. and China, is both alarmist and irresponsible.Alarmist and irresponsible? Far from it.One of […]

By the time you see this, I will be somewhere over Eurasia bound for Delhi. Over the next few weeks I’ll be traveling around India, where I’ll be giving talks and attending events on behalf of the U.S. State Department. Regular Via Meadia readers know I do trips like this from time to time. These […]

Is the information revolution having its Thermidor? (Thermidor was a month in the French revolutionary calendar; in Thermidor of the Year II—July 1794 for the reactionaries—the fever of the Reign of Terror broke and the revolution began to settle down.) There are times when it seems so; social media seems to be hogging all the […]

Don’t tell Al Gore, but Russia and China are leading the charge to take custody of the internet from a handful of U.S.-based NGOs and give it to the UN.The BBC reports that Russia has submitted a proposal to give a UN council responsibility for “allocating at least some of the internet’s addresses as well as the […]

Another green subsidy, another green scandal. The Wall Street Journal reports that a governent program meant to aid businesses that turn cooking oils into fuel may be guilty of serious fraud. The federal government now alleges that two of these businesses have been abusing the system, casting a pall over the entire program: In December 2010, […]

Citizens of China’s richest city are flocking overseas, and many are headed for the English-speaking world. FT: Shanghai Overseas Chinese Affairs Office [reports that] 1.02m Chinese with Shanghai residence permits, or Shanghai natives with foreign citizenship, are currently living or studying in 159 countries around the world. That figure is half again what it was […]

Standing at its full height, India could rival China and perhaps someday surpass it as the manufacturing giant of the world. Right now, however, India’s failure to develop a strong local manufacturing sector has exposed it to many serious economic problems, one of which is a trade deficit with China. While India should be able […]

Detroit’s Highland Park public school district is in such bad shape that the city has decided to outsource the whole school system to a private company that runs for-profit charter schools: The parents came to hear from the charter company, Leona Group LLC, which promises to improve the learning environment and boost student performance in a district […]

By now, it is well known that Amtrak is bleeding money and not even coming close to breaking even on the majority of its routes—with one notable exception being the popular northeast corridor routes between Boston and DC. But running profitable train lines isn’t Amtrak’s only problem; it is equally bad at the much simpler task of […]

The figures for July are in, and they’re a mixed bag: Continuing a long slog upward from the depths of the recession, the American economy added 163,000 nonfarm payroll jobs in July, the Labor Department said on Friday. That compares to a revised 64,000 jobs added in June.July’s job growth was higher than economists had been expecting, […]