A small college in Missouri has come up with a surprisingly simple solution to the student loan crisis: it will no longer accept students who take out loans to pay for tuition. Instead, for the 90 percent of its students who require some form of financial aid, the college offers students a number of on-campus work opportunities. […]

A Saudi newspaper reported this morning that women will now be allowed to ride motorbikes and bicycles—well, sort of. The Times of Israel has the scoop: The Al-Yawm daily cited an unnamed official from the powerful religious police as saying women will be allowed to ride bikes in parks and recreational areas, but they must […]

Susan A. Patton, a 1977 Princeton alumna and one of the first women to attend the university, created a media firestorm last week by urging Princeton girls to lock down a husband while in college. She wrote in the Daily Princetonian, As Princeton women, we have almost priced ourselves out of the market. Simply put, there […]

America’s renewable fuels program has been hit with a massive fraud case. A Texas man was ordered to pay $55 million in restitution and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison last Friday for selling nearly $42 million in fraudulent biofuel credits.Jeffrey David Gunselman took advantage of a weakness in the 2007 US Renewable […]

South Korea has vowed to shoot first and ask questions later if its forces are provoked by North Korea, as angry rhetoric on the Korean peninsula escalated dramatically today. “If there is any provocation…there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations,” President Park Geun-hye said on Monday. According to the FT, “Her comments suggest that […]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s the latest picture, derived from the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves database.The dollar was supposed to be doomed by the might of a single European currency, but the developing world’s central bankers are backing away. They have shed €45 billion from their holdings […]

Guess who else has shale oil? The FT has the answer: Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Lukoil, said Russia, the world’s second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, will be able to maintain crude output of 10m barrels a day for years to come as output from western Siberia’s Bazhenov Shale offsets declines in the country’s mature oilfields.It’s likely that Russian […]

This week saw the return of comments here at Via Meadia. We made same changes to the system to improve the quality of the dialogue: 1. Comments can be voted up or down, and reader rankings will determine the prominence of each comment. This is an important tool, and we hope the community will take advantage of […]

Over at the New York Times, where the California Comeback tune is sung louder than anywhere outside Jerry Brown’s office, Timothy Egan has written a heartfelt paean to what he sees as the Golden State’s bright future. Egan boasts that, despite “California-hating naysayers” predicting a Greek style collapse, California in fact “is dreaming once again”: All […]

Natural gas began flowing out of the Tamar gas field off the coast of Israel yesterday, in a sign of Israel’s changing position in the global energy landscape. The Tamar field is the smaller of two adjacent reservoirs, and developing it was the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history. A 150 kilometer pipeline, one of the longest of […]