Not everyone is as gloomy as we are on the prospects for peace with the Taliban. David Ignatius, for one, takes a much more optimistic view. In this season of good will, there is a rare bit of good cheer about the prospects for peace with the Taliban in Afghanistan. The reason seems to be […]

Are accountability and honesty about to make an appearance on the political scene in China? The new Chinese leadership looks like it’s going to take a crack at making it so: Xinhua news agency says receptions for high-ranking officers will no longer feature luxury banquets or alcohol. The diktat, passed on 4 December, has also […]

[The traditional Via Meadia Yule Blog continues today, Boxing Day, with the third of the Thirteen Posts of Christmas.  From Christmas Eve through to Twelfth Night, we explore the Christmas story and the ideas behind the celebration.]The documentary sources for the Christmas story pretty good by the standards of the ancient world, but few and […]

Some good tidings for Obama’s Afghanistan strategy? It’s emerging that in a speech at a conference last week in France, where Taliban and Afghan government officials were meeting face to face, the Taliban appeared to be making all the right noises to set themselves up as responsible stakeholders in a modern democratic Afghanistan. The speech […]

Russia’s plans to use its energy reserves and the financial assets of Gazprom to establish greater control of the energy distribution in the EU have largely been checked, but that doesn’t mean an end to Russian ambitions. The buy-up of the state-owned gas monopoly in Kyrgyzstan is a significant step forward in Russia’s attempts to […]

One of the biggest fiscal crises facing state and federal government is rising and unsustainable pension costs, as we’ve often had occasion to notice. As more states look at ways to deal with the problem one approach keeps popping up on the radar screen. In Pennsylvania as well as in Kansas, politicians are facing the […]

By any measure, Australia is one of the world’s most well-off countries with the cleaner politics and more freedoms than most anywhere else on earth. It has the second highest human development index, the fifth highest per capita income in the world and its economy has done exceptionally well since the crash. Despite all that, […]

If the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then the 21st century just might belong to the East. The British boarding school system is spreading throughout Asia, and fast. Centuries-old schools with alumni like Lord Byron and Winston Churchill are successfully establishing satellite campuses in Hong Kong, Bangkok, and beyond. […]

Merry Christmas and happy holiday to all! Chrismas is a tense morning wherever the Meads gather, as we jump whenever the telephone rings. There’s an old South Carolina custom that when two friends or relations greet one another on Christmas morning, the first one who says “Christmas gift!” gets to select one of the other […]

Sometimes if you wait long enough, old fashions again become the wave of the future. According to the New York Times, falconry, usually associated with knighthood and medieval epics, may be one of the jobs of the future: At a time when many business solutions seem to come in the form of apps or other software, Airstrike […]