America’s renewable fuels program has been hit with a massive fraud case. A Texas man was ordered to pay $55 million in restitution and sentenced to more than 15 years in prison last Friday for selling nearly $42 million in fraudulent biofuel credits.Jeffrey David Gunselman took advantage of a weakness in the 2007 US Renewable […]

South Korea has vowed to shoot first and ask questions later if its forces are provoked by North Korea, as angry rhetoric on the Korean peninsula escalated dramatically today. “If there is any provocation…there should be a strong response in initial combat without any political considerations,” President Park Geun-hye said on Monday. According to the FT, “Her comments suggest that […]

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here’s the latest picture, derived from the IMF’s Currency Composition of Official Foreign Exchange Reserves database.The dollar was supposed to be doomed by the might of a single European currency, but the developing world’s central bankers are backing away. They have shed €45 billion from their holdings […]

Guess who else has shale oil? The FT has the answer: Leonid Fedun, vice-president of Lukoil, said Russia, the world’s second-largest oil producer after Saudi Arabia, will be able to maintain crude output of 10m barrels a day for years to come as output from western Siberia’s Bazhenov Shale offsets declines in the country’s mature oilfields.It’s likely that Russian […]

This week saw the return of comments here at Via Meadia. We made same changes to the system to improve the quality of the dialogue: 1. Comments can be voted up or down, and reader rankings will determine the prominence of each comment. This is an important tool, and we hope the community will take advantage of […]

Over at the New York Times, where the California Comeback tune is sung louder than anywhere outside Jerry Brown’s office, Timothy Egan has written a heartfelt paean to what he sees as the Golden State’s bright future. Egan boasts that, despite “California-hating naysayers” predicting a Greek style collapse, California in fact “is dreaming once again”: All […]

Natural gas began flowing out of the Tamar gas field off the coast of Israel yesterday, in a sign of Israel’s changing position in the global energy landscape. The Tamar field is the smaller of two adjacent reservoirs, and developing it was the largest infrastructure project in Israel’s history. A 150 kilometer pipeline, one of the longest of […]

The Rijksmuseum is reopening in Amsterdam after a ten-year restoration. This is a must-see museum that should be on everyone’s lifetime to-do list, and it sounds as if those of us who have been there already need to go back and see what they’ve done. The Financial Times reports: What has been done with the museum is […]

Writing for the Washington Post’s Wonkblog, Brad Plumer has a nice round-up of the costs and benefits of automating cars. After going through the litany of advantages, including higher efficiencies and roads more friendly to bikers and walkers, he brings up this criticism: More and more people will drive. Think about all the people who are not allowed […]

The Great Hugo has taken on a mystical religious aura in death. His followers are claiming fantastic things, including the claim that Chavez advised Jesus Christ in heaven that it was time for a Latin American pope. Chavez’ followers are not explaining why El Commandante recommended a conservative Argentine rather than a liberation theologian for […]