Ashin Wirathu’s serene face dominates the most recent cover of Time magazine, which calls it “The Face of Buddhist Terror.” Wirathu even calls himself the “Burmese Bin Laden.” But Burmese citizens, including President Thein Sein, have rushed to defend him against his treatment in the Time cover story. The article “damaged the reputation of Buddhism,” said the […]

As the Bloomberg era is ending in New York, teachers’ unions are licking their chops. More than ten years ago, Mayor Bloomberg wrested control of the public school system and embarked on an ambitious agenda of reform, instituting measures such as giving principals greater control over their budgets, making teacher tenure more difficult to obtain, closing […]

Howard University and several other historically black colleges and universities around the country have been facing serious financial shortfalls this year. Earlier this month, the vice chairwoman of Howard’s board of trustees sent a letter to trustees sounding the alarm on the university’s financial situation. Days later, the chairman of the board announced that there […]

The Muslim Brotherhood is failing to govern in Egypt, and its popularity is on the skids. Crime is up, jobs are as scarce as tourists and foreign investors, protests loom, and the Brotherhood is busy infighting as more radical forces edge toward center stage.That’s why this story is important: Egypt’s military is stepping back into […]

The White House continued to dither this week while the Middle East burned. This week’s essay looked at the Obama administration’s failures in Syria—its self-created problems of “red lines” and bold rhetoric not backed by action: The combination of grave and growing dangers in the Middle East with a lightweight policy response in Washington is […]

Solazyme is a company, started in a garage, that hopes to produce fuel oil from algae. The company is having trouble scaling up production to commercial levels, so to make ends meet, it’s producing a slightly different oil and selling it as a cosmetic product. And while skincare is all well and good, the potential […]

An important education story from earlier this week that we failed to note: a new study run by the National Council on Teacher Quality has called U.S. colleges of education an “industry of mediocrity” that churns out ill-prepared and under-qualified teachers.The Wall Street Journal reported the jaw-dropping statistics: As evidence mounts that teacher quality is one […]

The Economist‘s ‘Democracy in America’ blog has an excellent post titled “Climate Change: A Cooling Consensus” that’s well worth your time this weekend. It’s a very well-written essay encapsulating more or less what we’ve been saying all along here at Via Meadia. It also notes some important ways in which the debate has shifted. A […]

We were cautiously optimistic on the immigration bill wending its way through the Senate as of last Friday. We thought, and continue to think, that the general move is in a more positive direction—that the core political dynamic of trading better border enforcement for addressing the problems of current illegals is a sound one.But a […]

Talk about perverse incentives! It appears that Chinese coolant manufacturers have been producing an excess of a harmful greenhouse chemical in order to dispose of it responsibly under the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). By using incinerators to cleanly burn off the chemical, HFC-23, these manufacturers were earning emission credits that they would in turn […]