First Tripoli, now Beirut. Next, Hezbollah?From the NYT: Gun battles between Lebanese factions supporting and opposing the government of President Bashar al-Assad spread to Beirut on Monday in the most serious outbreak of violence in Lebanon since the Syrian uprising began, leaving several people dead and the country more tense than ever in its effort […]

For all the talk of globalization, until quite recently the world did not look flat or well integrated when seen from most Central Asian airports. Many capital cities in Central Asia, like Tashkent, Bishkek, or Dushanbe offered primarily flights to Moscow, St. Petersburg, and other Russian cities popular for the hundreds of thousands of labor […]

One of the story threads we like to keep an eye on here at Via Meadia is loosely called “jobs of the future”. It’s a way to look at the shape of the new economy struggling to emerge from the disintegrating remains of the blue social model, and it’s a focus that we think can […]

Remember when Occupy Wall Street was sweeping the nation? How the mighty have fallen. We marveled at OWS’s spectacular fizzle this spring as it threatened reassert itself with the advent of more propitious weather for street demonstrations. But though Occupy is a bust, we speculated that we may yet see a real left-populist movement emerge […]

The 2012 presidential election continued to tighten in May. President Obama still leads both in the polls and in our electoral college map, but his lead — within the margin of error — continues to slip.No new states have flipped into the GOP column; if the election were held today and the national swing away […]

Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was president of Brazil from 1994 to 2002, was awarded the Kluge Prize last week. The Kluge “recognizes and celebrates work of the highest quality and greatest impact in areas that advance understanding of the human experience” and is administered by the Library of Congress. It’s a fitting reward for one of the […]

A high profile plan for a high speed rail link between London and England’s rustbelt in the north is running into trouble. The roughly $50 billion line is backed by those who hope it will boost incomes and business in northern English cities like Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds.The trouble is that the harder the British […]

Participants in the most famous of the world’s useless gabfests — the G-8 summit at which such global potentates as the prime ministers of Canada and Italy gather to pretend to make decisions and have their pictures taken with their colleagues — agreed on the need to issue anodyne statements that make them all look […]

What with the end of the Bard semester and rushing to prepare for a two week tour of Europe, I haven’t had the time to write about the biggest event on the Mead social calendar in the first half of May: the last night of the 2011-12 season at the Metropolitan Opera.The season closed with […]

London Heathrow still reigns as the busiest airport in Europe, but airlines and airport operators there warn that without expansion plans in place, Heathrow could lose its status as the preeminent European hub in the next 15 years, the Telegraph reports.With just two runways, industry professionals predict, many airlines would likely abandon London for fast-growing […]