Boris Johnson, mayor of London, just jumped on the fracking train: Our nukes are so high-maintenance that the cost of disposing of their spent fuel rods is put at about £100 billion – more than the value of all the electricity they have produced since the Fifties. The hills and dales of Britain are being […]

From time to time, Via Meadia has pointed to a long-standing problem in higher education: finding an objective measure of how much a student has learned. College grades and course credits are fungible, relative measures that don’t necessarily tell us anything about what’s inside a student’s head.So we’re pleased to see a New York Times […]

Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal visited Gaza for the first time since 1967 yesterday. Speaking to thousands of flag-waving supporters, Meshaal doubled down on Hamas’s solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—one state, no Jews: First of all, Palestine—from the [Jordan] River to the [Mediterranean] Sea, from its north to its south—is our land, our right, and […]

FEMA is still picking up the pieces from Hurricane Sandy more than a month after the storm hit New York City. Although most of the city has returned to normal, federal disaster employees continue to find distressed people, often the elderly and disabled, trapped in apartments in the farthest corners of the city. Federal and city […]

The Game of Thrones is entering what promises to be an even more dramatic phase. The Philippines announced yesterday that its government would welcome a change to Japan’s pacifist postwar constitution as a counterbalance to China: “We would welcome that very much,” Albert del Rosario told the Financial Times in an interview. “We are looking […]

As we’ve written before, Via Meadia wishes ill on nobody, even demagogic thugs who have undermined democracy and done their best to drag their part of this world into a nightmare of corruption and poverty, whatever their intentions. So when we hear the news that Hugo Chavez is once again in Cuba for medical reasons, […]

Saudi Arabia is diving deep into the renewable energy world. The FT has the story: People in Egypt and even Europe could one day turn on their lights with electricity transmitted from the vast bank of solar power stations that Saudi Arabia aims to build in coming years, according to a senior Saudi official and […]

Remember the war on terror? Remember how it was supposed to be over? Well not only is it not over, it’s expanding to new places and taking on new enemies. The latest front is Africa.In domestic news, Apple announced plans to assemble some of its computers in the good old United States. A study commissioned by […]

Egyptian President Morsi backtracked on a decree he issued two weeks ago that gave him extraordinary powers and sparked a political crisis when protestors labeled Morsi a dictator and attacked the presidential palace. Those protestors are still defiant, despite Morsi’s capitulation, the Washington Post reports: The decree, which Morsi had said was necessary to move […]

After a decade of non-stop yammering about America’s inevitable and already far-advanced decline, the chattering classes (even in Europe and China) are beginning to reconsider. As the FT‘s Philip Stephens points out, the US is in pretty good shape if you look at its long-term outlook: The big reason for optimism is structural rather than cyclical. […]