The Northern Sea Route has captured the imagination of sailors and explorers through the ages, as well as bringing some unlucky souls to their early deaths in frigid waters. The crew of the Yong Sheng, a 19,000-ton Chinese cargo ship, almost certainly won’t risk that fate in its voyage from Dalian in northeast China, around Norway, to […]

With the current crop of Via Meadia interns moving on, we’re looking for the next batch of ambitious young people to help us research and write for the site. Former interns have gone on to jobs in journalism, tech startups, the State Department and the US military, and have gotten their own clips at The American […]

Here’s another California first: it’s the first state in the nation to pass a law protecting transgender kids from discrimination. At long last they can use any bathroom they want: State Assembly Speaker John Perez said it put “California at the forefront of leadership on transgender rights”.Massachusetts and Connecticut have state-wide policies granting the same […]

British Prime Minister David Cameron made an appeal to the British public in Monday’s Telegraph to embrace fracking, outlining the benefits of exploiting the UK’s shale gas reserves and seeking to dispel what he called the “myths” surrounding the polarizing topic. No. 10 has been mounting a public relations campaign this summer to convince Brits that fracking is in […]

Twelve people were injured and three remain hospitalized after a mob of Sri Lankan Buddhists attacked a mosque in Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, on Saturday night. The mosque was built only a month ago after local unrest and sporadic attacks against Muslims forced the mosque leaders to relocate. Now the new mosque will close […]

Law professors, brace yourselves: tenured positions are about to get a whole lot more competitive.Until now, the American Bar Association has required law schools to maintain a high number of tenured positions as a condition of accreditation. This worked fine when legal education was expanding, but now that enrollment is on the wane, law schools are […]

Let’s just get this out of the way: the oil being extracted from Canada’s tar sands is dirty. The energy source is extremely energy-intensive to extract and refine; one study estimates that tar sands oil emits 8 to 37 percent more greenhouse gases than conventional crude. The tar sands are also leaking, so far having spilled […]

Last week we reported that Spain’s scandal-hit administration was trying to prop up its popularity at home by stirring up a territorial dispute with the UK over Gibraltar. Despite Spanish threats and painfully long lines at the Gibraltar-Spanish border crossing, though, the British have shown no interest in opening any sort of negotiations on Gibraltar’s […]

Britain’s legal system, hundreds of years old, is still breaking new ground. The British bar has just admitted to the bar 18-year old Gabrielle Turnquest as the youngest lawyer in British history. As one might expect, Turnquest was ahead of the curve from an early age, earning a college degree in psychology at the age […]

Massachusetts is blessed with a golden-egg-laying goose in its vibrant tech sector, thanks in part to wizard magnets like MIT, but the state government apparently thinks that this is one goose that would be better off cooked. The legislature has passed a new “software tax” that will make doing tech business in the state more […]