The United Arab Emirates withdrew its ambassador from Tehran this week. The move was ostensibly made in response to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the Iranian-occupied, UAE-claimed island of Abu Musa. Of course, the timing of Ahmadinejad’s unprecedented and incendiary visit–no Iranian leader had ever frequented Abu Musa previously–coupled with the extreme nature of the […]

It’s easy and comforting to dismiss the recent wave of anti-semitic hate crimes sweeping France as a continental outlier–an exception to the rule of European tolerance.It’s also wrong.Take Malmö, Sweden, for example, a city whose mayor has taken to blaming Jews for their own persecution: The store window had been smashed many times before. The […]

This excellent chart from Visual Economics (h/t Derek Thompson) reinforces one of the core themes we’ve been following at Via Meadia: the rapid expansion of new technology over time. The graph tracks the spread of the most important new technologies of the 20th century, including cars, refrigerators, electricity and computers.The chart highlights one of the […]

The financial upheaval of the past few years exposed faults in private and public sector institutions alike. The meltdown in the mortgage market, the collapse or near-collapse of important financial institutions, and the subsequent damage to public and private portfolios hit both Wall Street and the Blue government establishment. As we have noted at Via […]

Whe IBM’s “Watson” supercomputer made its debut on Jeopardy last year, few realized that it would mark the beginning of a sea change in the American workforce. Shortly after its debut Watson computers became available for diagnosing patients, and last Month IBM announced that Watson computers would begin a foray into the banking sector as […]

Most Americans would like the Afghan war to come to an end and, especially, want our soldiers to come home. That’s not what Russsia’s President Putin, thinks, however. Speaking to the Duma, Putin announced his support for the ISAF mission: “We understand what is happening in Afghanistan – right?” Russia’s educator-in-chief lectured the Duma. “We […]

The highest number of tweets over a three-month period come from South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, and Egypt. These countries also show the highest number of tweets per citizen. Each is a former British colony which continues to have strong ties to the wider English speaking world.Former French colonies are far behind in tweets per person […]

With a civil war raging late last year, the do-gooder NGO crowd was aggressively pushing independence for South Sudan as a solution to the violence raging across Sudan. So far, it doesn’t seem to be working out very well. After nearly a year of minor skirmishes and tribal conflict, the sides appear closer to war […]

Before he became the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren carved out an impressive career as a historian, teaching at Harvard, Yale and Georgetown, and penning two critically acclaimed works of Middle East scholarship, Six Days of War and Power, Faith and Fantasy. His essay, “Israel’s Resilient Democracy,” recently published in Foreign Policy, […]

Solar’s bad year continues as yet another solar company’s ambitious projects prove unprofitable. Fledgling solar provider BrightSource Energy canceled an IPO at the last minute, admitting that it couldn’t find buyers at the expected price. And BrightSource is not alone in its stock woes—the New York Times reports that leading companies like First Solar and […]