Despite the gloom on the jobs front, corporate profits are gushing.  Honeywell, Caterpillar and Xerox have all posted 40 percent plus gains in earnings, and more good news comes in from GE, Verizon and McDonald’s.The one thing almost everyone forgets about the business cycle in both good times and bad is the simplest:  the business […]

Pakistan’s “all-weather” friend might not be so reliable after all.Here at Via Meadia we’ve highlighted the limits of any future Chinese-Pakistani partnership. Others seem to agree, as this in-depth piece at Foreign Policy shows.Pakistan wants a sugar daddy to help it against India and during the Cold War the US was willing to play that […]

As the US reduces its presence in Afghanistan, that country will become an increasingly important theater in the India-Pakistan rivalry. This article by Sumit Ganguly, a well respected student of South Asian affairs, outlines some of the strategic factors that will lead India to oppose Pakistan’s plans for Afghanistan as the US draws down.Other countries […]

The idea that hundreds of millions of Chinese will move from the country to the city is one of the basic assumptions that guide investors and policymakers in the US and elsewhere.According to Jamil Anderlini of the Financial Times, that assumption could be wrong.  China is likely, he says, to maintain the two-tier hukou system […]

A group of four respected academics have turned the prevailing wisdom on the source of Pakistani extremism on its head. They surveyed 6,000 Pakistanis in the provinces of Punjab, Balochistan, Sindh, and the province formerly known as NWFP, now called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa on their attitudes toward the likes of al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and […]

Once upon a time, there was a sheikh named Hamad.  He was very proud of this name.  So proud, in fact, that he had it set in letters of sand.  The letters were a kilometer long and so big you could read them from space.Our sheikh was very happy.  Surely, he thought, everyone will see […]

Every once and a while, we at Via Meadia come across a story that dampens the generally sunny mood that permeates the stately Mead manor in glamorous Queens.This is one of them.Mass male rape in war zones is not a pleasant subject.  That roughly one in four males in the eastern Congo war zone reports […]

Gucci, Rolex, Armani and Big Macs flown in daily from China are part of North Korea’s brisk import trade, says the Los Angeles Times.  It is good to know that the Dear Leader and chums lack for nothing; for a few lucky North Koreans the workers’ paradise has already arrived.

The French and the Germans have come to a grand bargain, the eurozone summit is making progress and the markets are humming along. Crisis averted? More likely, postponed.With only sketchy details available as to the shape of the deal, it already seems that these measures won’t be enough to deal with the underlying problems. Fiddling […]

The Pew Global Attitudes Project has a new, must read poll out on Muslim-Western-Jewish relations, with fascinating results. Take a look here; below are some of the more remarkable conclusions we have pulled out of the survey.– 53 percent of Muslims in the various countries polled think the lack of prosperity in their nation is due […]