There’s been an even more sinister turn in the story of the illiterate Christian girl accused of blasphemy by a Pakistani imam: the imam himself was arrested and accused of tampering with evidence and desecrating the Koran. “The imam was arrested after his deputy Maulvi Zubair and two others told a magistrate he added pages […]

As regular readers know, we have tried to stay away from the all consuming horse race journalism over the US presidential race while taking a look from time to time at where the two horses actually are. Our method belongs to the quick and dirty school of political analysis rather than the painstaking model crafting […]

As regular followers of Via Meadia will know, WRM recently returned from his trip to India. He and AI staffer Peter Mellgard took photos while traveling.

A public notary in Brazil is attempting to push Brazil across a new frontier in family arrangements by “accepting a civil union between three people”, reports the BBC: Public Notary Claudia do Nascimento Domingues has said the man and two women should be entitled to family rights.[…]Nathaniel Santos Batista Junior, a jurist who helped draft […]

An article in the Financial Times illustrates an important theme we follow here at Via Meadia: the geopolitical and economic shifts as the new energy realities of the 21st century sink in.As the FT puts it, Experts are convinced that Tamar and Leviathan will not be the last big Israeli discoveries. They point to the […]

Most of us take a pretty simple and straightforward view of economic conditions: expansions are good and recessions are bad. But the reality is more complicated. More than 300 years of capitalism have taught us a few things. One of them is that recessions are a normal part of the business cycle. You have winter […]

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 […]