It’s Christmas Eve today and time for the oldest tradition at Via Meadia: our annual Yule Blog when we update and present our thirteen posts of Christmas running from the preparatory Advent blog on Christmas Eve through Twelfth Night. During this holiday season in 2013-2014 we will blog on a light holiday schedule through New Year’s Day and on January 2 we will be back at full force.

Brent crude hit a new two-week high at $112 a barrel as South Sudan’s troubles turned attention to Africa as an important pain point for the global oil trade. Combined with the losses in output in Nigeria and Libya, the shortfall in African oil is exceeding whatever extra oil was coming to market due to the US shale boom.

The Turkish lira took a tumble on Friday, hitting an all-time low against the dollar amidst rising concerns about the latest political turmoil to hit Erdoğan’s government. Turkey is losing its margin for error. The politics and the economics are both going wrong in a country that not all that long ago was seen as a model for the Middle East.

The US economy may soon be able to take off the training wheels. When investors celebrated rather than mourned the Fed’s first, tentative step to cut its Quantitative Easing program, it was a sign that investors think growing strength can offset the impact of reduced Federal Reserve bond purchases. This is not only a good sign for the US, but a good sign for the world.

Anti-Semitism is not absent from the BDS movement. But there’s a lot more going on here than mere bigotry.

Productivity increases are almost always a good thing, but this time, rising productivity hasn’t translated into more jobs or higher wages. This has happened before, but it wasn’t easy. Can we transition again?

Now that same sex marriage is here to stay, a new frontier in the marriage wars seems ready to open. A George W. Bush-appointed judge in Utah has struck down important parts of the state’s anti-polygamy law, though for now at least it is still illegal to have more than one valid marriage license at the same time.

While most news coverage tends to look at the state of Ukrainian street protests to gauge how things are going, there is lots of evidence that the real power in Ukraine rests with the zillionaires and billionaires who emerged from the twilight of Communism, getting their mitts on everything that wasn’t nailed down in the country. There are signs that the debate among the oligarchs is tilting toward the EU affiliation, but this may have more to do with power dynamics than the size of crowds on the street.

One of the biggest questions of the 21st century is whether the demand for ethnic, cultural and/or religious homogeneity will continue to convulse world politics, drive new generations of conflict, and create millions more victims.

Syria is serving as a petri dish for European jihad, EU officials have found. There are now entire training camps in Syria composed of European fighters, sending EU interior ministers into a panic over the prospect of their return. The costs of inaction in Syria continue to mount.