Many observers noted that the use of the Stuxnet worm against Iran’s nuclear program opened a new era in warfare. They were correct; cyberwar is real and it can and will change the way the world works.The BBC carries a report that makes it official: we and our allies aren’t the only people with the […]

If the rest of the world wants to know how to build transportation infrastructure, America’s metropolitan transit supervisors give them a pretty good idea of what not to do. On both sides of the country, transportation bureaucrats are demonstrating that they never fail to projects which cost too much and take too long. Bloomberg names […]

Cairo is seeing a wave of sexual harassment, underscoring EU and UN reports showing that nearly two-thirds of Egyptian men admit to having sexually harassed women at some point in their lives. (Only 2.4 percent of females report these incidents to the police.)The good news is that volunteer groups have formed to patrol Cairo’s downtown […]

I think we all know how this story turns out in the end: Some of the earliest fossils of pre-historic arthropods – dating to about 230 million years ago – have been discovered entombed in amber, PNAS journal reports. […]After a painstaking screen of more than 70,000 droplets, Prof Grimaldi and his team discovered three ancient arthropods […]

Have Iran sanctions finally gone too far? Desperate nerds from all over Iran deluged message boards and online forums earlier this week with pleas for help: World of Warcraft, the popular electronic game, had cut them off, reportedly in order to “tighten up” its parent company’s compliance with U.S. sanctions.It’s not clear that the Iranian […]

After almost three years and well more than 40,000 published reader comments (and half a million spam comments that either we or our spam filter managed to identify and trash), Via Meadia is joining the ranks of non-comment blogs. We’re grateful to readers over those years who have shared their reactions to what they read […]

Thanks to our readers and to a hardworking team of staffers, interns and guest posters, Via Meadia had more visitors this August than in any month in site history. In a relatively slow news month, and with WRM traveling in India for three weeks, the site received well  over 20,000 visits per day. (There is […]

Last year, a massive cheating scandal at an elite New York high school prompted closer scrutiny of alleged cheating elsewhere. This year, it’s happening again, but at a higher level: the New York Times reports that more than 100 students at Harvard University are suspected of cheating and plagiarism on exams in a class on government (sadly, it […]

Known as Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese, and Liancourt Rocks to the rest of us, a few small islets are the focus of an escalating fight between Japan and South Korea. WSJ: Japan’s foreign minister ratcheted up pressure on South Korea with tough rhetoric and hints of further countermeasures, after Seoul Thursday formally rejected […]

Over the past few months, the conventional picture of China’s meteoric rise to economic dominance has been cast into serious doubt. Numerous economic indicators are pointing toward a significant slowdown. In the past month alone, manufacturing has hit a nine-month low, steel prices have fallen dramatically, and investors have begun pulling their money out of […]