A jarring cover fronts next week’s Economist: “Syria: The Death of a Country” is the headline article inside. The whole piece is worth the read, but here’s a juicy bit that backs up what Via Meadia has been arguing for some time now. … President Barack Obama has suggested that saving lives alone is not […]

Now here’s a sign of the times in Asia: Bloomberg reports that Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, is on track to produce more vehicles in Thailand by 2015 than it does in China. Here’s the story: Thailand’s total vehicle output may rise 30 percent to 3 million units by the end of 2015, according to Macquarie […]

Can a drug and the many people who use it really explain the problems of an entire country? That’s the thrust of Peer Gatter’s photo series over at Foreign Policy and, presumably, his $160, 900-page book Politics of Qat: The Role of a Drug in Ruling Yemen (which VM has not yet read). Qat, if […]

China lashed out angrily at Japan after Japan’s hotheaded Prime Minister Shinzo Abe made incendiary comments about China in an interview with the Washington Post, which was published yesterday.“It is rare that a country’s leader brazenly distorts facts, attacks its neighbor and instigates antagonism between regional countries,” said China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei. “Such […]

The dollar is getting stronger compared to other world currencies, according to the Wall Street Journal. It was not so very long ago that the chattering classes were prophesying the end of the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency. In the FT, an economist worried, “The US will unavoidably account for a declining fraction of global gross domestic product, […]

Yesterday President Mohamed Morsi announced that the country will hold parliamentary elections this coming April. Bloomberg reports that, while Egypt’s Islamists are pleased, the liberal opposition is furious: “Holding the elections amid the persisting social tension and fragility of state institutions and before reaching a national consensus is irresponsible and will inflame the situation,” ElBaradei, a Nobel laureate […]

China’s armchair generals and active military officials alike are fully confident of a quick, decisive, and overwhelming victory against Japan if territorial disputes ever escalated into war. Time has the story: “The real fight would be very short. It is very possible the war would end in a couple of days or even in a few hours,” […]

The French “Mission Accomplished” moment in Mali is over. After fleeing the major cities in the north of the country, the insurgents have gone back on the offensive, repeatedly pounding the town of Gao for hours on end until French troops intervened to drive them away. The Wall Street Journal now warns that the insurgency could last for […]

Twelve-year-old Balachandran Prabhakaran was shot five times in the chest in May 2009. In pictures, moments before his death, Prabhakaran appears alert, munching on something in a sandbagged army bunker. Subsequent photographs taken not even two hours later show his chubby, lifeless body sprawled on the ground, punctured by bullet holes analysts say were made […]

Illinois voters aren’t sure what to make of the pension crisis. Despite a months-long, heated battle between pension reformers and unions in Springfield, voters are relatively evenly divided on what to do and are opposed to making any radical changes. As the State Journal-Register reports: “There’s a general feeling that state employees are going to have to […]