Have Iran sanctions finally gone too far? Desperate nerds from all over Iran deluged message boards and online forums earlier this week with pleas for help: World of Warcraft, the popular electronic game, had cut them off, reportedly in order to “tighten up” its parent company’s compliance with U.S. sanctions.It’s not clear that the Iranian […]

After almost three years and well more than 40,000 published reader comments (and half a million spam comments that either we or our spam filter managed to identify and trash), Via Meadia is joining the ranks of non-comment blogs. We’re grateful to readers over those years who have shared their reactions to what they read […]

Thanks to our readers and to a hardworking team of staffers, interns and guest posters, Via Meadia had more visitors this August than in any month in site history. In a relatively slow news month, and with WRM traveling in India for three weeks, the site received well  over 20,000 visits per day. (There is […]

The Russian nightmare of Islamic radicalism spreading like a contagion is growing closer to reality. Reuters has a thorough report on the radicalization taking place in the mountainous region of Dagestan and the government’s heavy-handed crackdown: In the first half of 2012 alone, the Caucasian Knot website recorded 185 insurgency-related deaths and 168 wounded, making […]

Last year, a massive cheating scandal at an elite New York high school prompted closer scrutiny of alleged cheating elsewhere. This year, it’s happening again, but at a higher level: the New York Times reports that more than 100 students at Harvard University are suspected of cheating and plagiarism on exams in a class on government (sadly, it […]

Known as Dokdo in Korean, Takeshima in Japanese, and Liancourt Rocks to the rest of us, a few small islets are the focus of an escalating fight between Japan and South Korea. WSJ: Japan’s foreign minister ratcheted up pressure on South Korea with tough rhetoric and hints of further countermeasures, after Seoul Thursday formally rejected […]

Over the past few months, the conventional picture of China’s meteoric rise to economic dominance has been cast into serious doubt. Numerous economic indicators are pointing toward a significant slowdown. In the past month alone, manufacturing has hit a nine-month low, steel prices have fallen dramatically, and investors have begun pulling their money out of […]

Rajesh Shah opened a men’s clothing store in the city of Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat and named it after his father’s nickname: Hitler. Shah says his father got this nickname because he was “very strict” and that he didn’t know of anyone named Adolf Hitler. Now he is being roundly attacked, and […]

Like most undercover security officials, members of Nigeria’s secret service work hard to hide their personal information from the public. It came as a surprise, then, when information—including names, addresses and bank account details—belonging to more than sixty service members was leaked online for several days. Worse, this information came with a message attached: the terrorist […]

The port of Gwadar on Pakistan’s southwestern coast is strategically well-placed just outside the Straight of Hormuz (see map). It is a deepwater port capable of handling international shipping vessels and oil tankers. It was built with help from Chinese money and has been run by a Singaporean company—until now.The FT reports that China is about […]