Prince Harry is apparently taking Rio by storm — playing volleyball on the beach, visiting a favela and generally getting along with all and sundry. It’s a good thing he’s there, and a good thing he’s doing well; most Brits don’t realize just how much they have riding on their relationship with Brazil.The reality is […]

Friday afternoon I was up in the rolling Dutchess County hunt country around Bard College meeting with students about their senior projects when a reporter from the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz called. We chatted for a while, and today I see that the reporter, Chemi Shalev, is running a story based on the interview on his […]

President Obama, who’d like to avoid going to war with Iran, is finding himself drawn more and more closely to it on account of his public pronouncements. “Of all the many paradoxes and ironies of this President’s foreign policy,” we wrote, “the reliance of ‘No Drama Obama’ on fomenting a crisis to stave off a […]

…by condemning the 1978 UN Convention Against Gender Discrimination as “incompatible with the values of Islamic sharia.” Need we tell you that the political forces behind this tastefully timed pronouncement were those empowered by the so-called Arab Spring? As the AFP notes: The Freedom and Justice Party, political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, says it […]

For decades, Detroit has been the poster child for urban decline in America. Now things have reached an even newer low: The city is projected to run out of money by next month and seems to have no credible plans to make up this shortfall.Interestingly, despite statements by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder that the state […]

At Via Meadia, we have been reporting for some time on what we have call “the War on the Young.” The Blue Social Model that my generation expanded without thinking about that tiny little detail of how we were going to pay for it all has placed local and state governments in the position of […]

I have no idea if this is any good (though @41jellis tweeted it, and his recommendations usually work) but here is the kind of thinking that is making the jobs of the future. Grandmother Mead might not approve of all of the language, but she had a soft spot for bargains.

Mention 2014 and Afghanistan, and most people’s attention jumps to the pullout of NATO troops. But in a recent lecture attended by Via Meadia staffers, Thomas Barfield, one of the United States’ leading experts on Afghanistan, noted that 2014 is also the year of presidential elections in Afghanistan – a potentially explosive event given that current president Hamid Karzai is […]

Fans of government health care keep telling us that government can do the job, and they point to countries like the UK as examples where single payer, government run health care systems deliver high quality, compassionate care.They are either grossly ignorant or they are lying through their teeth.A recent study by a British healthcare regulator […]

Ayatollah Khamenei, master of the mullahs, Supreme Leader and Guide of a revolution that has wrecked Iran’s economy, lost its position of leadership in the Middle East and trapped the country in increasingly hostile international isolation, likes what he hears from President Obama, reports the Washington Post: In a rare positive remark about the United […]