As Venezuela’s presidential election season heats up, the Chavez administration is cranking up its attacks on any and all possible threats to its continued rule.Given that an impressive three million voters participated in the opposition Democratic Unity Panel’s primary (which selected Henrique Capriles as its standard bearer), Chavez and company are sparing no lines of […]

The past few years have seen waves of new ideas in education reform: charter schools, new methods of teacher training, new testing, and merit pay, to name a few. Activists line up behind their preferred solutions, and then politicians from Barack Obama to Bobby Jindal jump on one or more of these bandwagons. But the […]

Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, the foreign minister of Cyprus, complained on Wednesday about the threatening behavior of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean, saying it was an attempt to intimidate Israeli and Cypriot cooperation on natural gas exploration. Ankara’s “provocative” military exercises and “bullying behavior” were “unacceptable”, she said.No surprise there; Turkey and the Greek Cypriots are about […]

As Greece descends further into chaos, with riots on the streets and mass expulsions from the major political parties, its creditors in Northern Europe seem surprisingly nonchalant, a stark contrast from their anxiety only a few weeks ago. A report in today’s FT claims that Germany and the other creditor governments have reassessed the potential […]

Via Meadia has been watching the increasingly empowered Hamas as it explores the opportunities opening up to it in a changing Middle East. Questions abound. As the group makes new friends in Egypt and Turkey, will it leave its old friend Iran behind? Will it modify its positions on peace talks with Israel and the […]

The Arab Spring is finally beginning to bear fruit. An article in today’s FT reports that Syria has a decades-old chemical weapons program that may fall into the hands of terrorist groups amidst the chaos of Syria’s civil war. Syrian stockpiles include significant amounts of nerve gas and “mustard blister agent,” and while they are […]

One of the big trends we follow here at Via Meadia to try to figure out what’s going on in the world is the impact of technology driven change on our institutions and our lives. An interesting article over at PandoDaily shows how even the titans of the tech world like database giant Oracle are […]

The conservative leader in the European Parliament, Martin Callanan, said today that the European Union must plan for Greece’s “orderly withdrawal” from the eurozone. At long last, a European leader is acknowledging Europe’s habit of “fudging.” Each new “solution” designed to “fix” Europe’s problems has in fact been a distraction, as layer upon layer of temporary […]

Europeans may not be adept at managing their finances, but at least they’re on the cutting edge of civil rights. On Tuesday a German high court ordered universities to raise salaries for beginning professors, claiming that a base salary roughly equivalent to $60,000 “violated the principle of appropriate pay for civil servants.”  The ruling comes […]

Many states are doing better this year than at any point since the beginning of the recession five years ago. Unfortunately, Rhode Island isn’t one of them. State and local government finances are in a deep hole after years of profligate spending. The only question now is who’s going to pay the price.Partisans of the […]