The Venerable Mead was born in Florence, South Carolina on this day in 1930.  Herbert Hoover was in the White House, economic recovery was “just around the corner”, and some of his father’s medical patients still payed their bills by leaving sacks of pecans and other local products on the back porch. After a long […]

Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf is the darling of aid NGOs, the Iron Lady of Liberia, an “uncompromising woman” and a champion fighter of corruption. So the recent appointment of her son as chief of the national oil company shouldn’t cause concern, right? Sirleaf is above nepotism. The development NGOs are behind her, and they know best.To be […]

In case you missed it earlier this week, AI Chairman Francis Fukuyama has built a drone and has documented the process on his blog. Here’s his take on why he did it: It is extremely easy to build a drone now that can do not just surveillance but can carry rather large payloads . . . I […]

As Venezuela’s presidential election season heats up, the Chavez administration is cranking up its attacks on any and all possible threats to its continued rule.Given that an impressive three million voters participated in the opposition Democratic Unity Panel’s primary (which selected Henrique Capriles as its standard bearer), Chavez and company are sparing no lines of […]

The past few years have seen waves of new ideas in education reform: charter schools, new methods of teacher training, new testing, and merit pay, to name a few. Activists line up behind their preferred solutions, and then politicians from Barack Obama to Bobby Jindal jump on one or more of these bandwagons. But the […]

Erato Kozakou-Marcoullis, the foreign minister of Cyprus, complained on Wednesday about the threatening behavior of Turkey in the eastern Mediterranean, saying it was an attempt to intimidate Israeli and Cypriot cooperation on natural gas exploration. Ankara’s “provocative” military exercises and “bullying behavior” were “unacceptable”, she said.No surprise there; Turkey and the Greek Cypriots are about […]

As Greece descends further into chaos, with riots on the streets and mass expulsions from the major political parties, its creditors in Northern Europe seem surprisingly nonchalant, a stark contrast from their anxiety only a few weeks ago. A report in today’s FT claims that Germany and the other creditor governments have reassessed the potential […]

Via Meadia has been watching the increasingly empowered Hamas as it explores the opportunities opening up to it in a changing Middle East. Questions abound. As the group makes new friends in Egypt and Turkey, will it leave its old friend Iran behind? Will it modify its positions on peace talks with Israel and the […]

The Arab Spring is finally beginning to bear fruit. An article in today’s FT reports that Syria has a decades-old chemical weapons program that may fall into the hands of terrorist groups amidst the chaos of Syria’s civil war. Syrian stockpiles include significant amounts of nerve gas and “mustard blister agent,” and while they are […]

One of the big trends we follow here at Via Meadia to try to figure out what’s going on in the world is the impact of technology driven change on our institutions and our lives. An interesting article over at PandoDaily shows how even the titans of the tech world like database giant Oracle are […]