The Syrian civil war took a definitive turn towards becoming a proper international crisis. Earlier today, Syrian shells fell on a Turkish border town killing five civilians. Turkey responded soon after by shelling targets within Syria. Turkey is, of course, a member of NATO: NATO said it would convene an urgent meeting on the issue […]

Drug policy is one of those areas Americans—left, right, and center—almost all agree about, in at least one respect: Our nation’s drug policies are often ineffectual at best and, at worst, self-defeating. The Drug War is obscenely expensive; it swells the ranks of a criminal class, ruining lives, destroying families, and filling our prisons to […]

Is Latin America in for a rough ride, or is it just Brazil and Argentina that are making the region’s economic prospects look bad?The 2012 Economic Survey (via BBC News), which is put out by the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), predicts that the region’s growth as a whole will be mediocre for […]

The Syrian civil war is making a bigger mark on Lebanon with each passing day. Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia and political party, has tried to keep hints of its involvement in the fighting in Syria a secret, with little success. Just today, an explosion in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, close to the border with Syria, killed […]

There’s no free lunch in economics, not even for central bankers and their powerful printing presses. As central banks across the world come up with ever-more exotic plans to stimulate us out of our economic malaise, the threat of inflation is always looming in the background. Some recent data points quietly point in that direction. […]

If and when African Union forces intervene to save Mali from Islamist extremists they will probably be met by child soldiers wielding machine guns. More than a thousand kids (probably many more) have been conscripted by the various fighting groups now stalking Mali’s northern deserts. The fighters pay big money: $30 per day for the soldier, and sometimes as […]

WSJ: Several big Chinese banks say they’ve canceled participation in the high-profile annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to be held in Tokyo next week as well as in the constellation of events taking place alongside. Some of the banks say they’ve also pulled out of another big financial-industry conference scheduled […]

Here at Via Meadia, we’re considering a new pension plan for our interns. Here’s how it works: The interns put money in the pension lockbox. The staff then takes money out of that lockbox and uses it to pay for lunches. But don’t worry: for every penny taken out of the lockbox, VM will place […]

It’s not just the wealthy who are raising a stink over François Hollande’s tax policies. Small French entrepreneurs are up in arms over his decision to tax capital gains at the same rate as earned income. Calling themselves “les pigeons,” which loosely translates to “suckers,” they’ve taken to Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests, […]

The Washington Post has some dire words of warning on China’s real estate market: As home prices have skyrocketed, many Chinese households have gone all in on real estate by pouring years of savings into buying as many homes as they can.But as the country’s economy slows to its worst pace in years, China’s dependence on real estate for growth […]