Many businesses anticipate that Obamacare will deal a blow to their bottom line in the form of fines and penalties. Some are now planning to evade the law’s fine for uninsured full-time employees by  pushing full-time employees to part-time status. The Wall Street Journal reports: Several restaurants, hotels and retailers have started or are preparing to […]

The split between the two Palestinian factions of Fatah and Hamas is deepening as more Middle Eastern governments turn to support Hamas. Last week the emir of Qatar made waves with a visit to Gaza, and now Turkish Prime Minister plans to follow suit. The New York Times reports: A visit by the leader of Turkey, a huge […]

The past few days in Syria have been particularly bloody and destructive, Reuters reports: An Islamist suicide car bomber killed at least 50 Syrian security men in Hama province on Monday, an opposition group said, in what would be one of the bloodiest single attacks on President Bashar al-Assad’s forces in a 20-month-old uprising.Syrian government […]

New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg concentrated on monitoring soda sizes in the months before Hurricane Sandy turned large stretches of his city into dark and freezing refugee camps.At least one city in California shares the mayor’s sense of what matters. The New York Times reports that Richmond, California is now preparing to become the first city […]

Though the US dominates the world of unmanned aerial vehicles, both armed and spy-types, other countries are fast catching up. Especially in Asia, the Global Post reports: In the Asia-Pacific region, the list of countries who have developed or purchased drones already includes Australia, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Thailand […]

The UK has always had an uneasy relationship with its neighbors across the English Channel, and this very much includes the European Union, which has aroused skepticism in London from the beginning. But some have been more skeptical than others. In general, Labour has been a relatively enthusiastic EU party, while the Tories are more […]

News from North Africa has been almost uniformly bad since the heyday of the Arab Spring. The messy Libya mission, the chaos in northern Mali, and the rise of al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as a potent terrorist force have been the biggest stories of the past year, and all suggest that radical Islam is spreading […]

Another scandal is erupting in the ongoing EU bailout saga. This time around, a report by the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), has revealed that foreign taxpayers will, in bailing out Cyprus, be helping make Russian mafiosos whole: The BND report concluded that this “black money” amounted to €26 billion—about 150% of the country’s […]

A story in this morning’s New York Times points out that the United States did not have forces in place capable of protecting its personnel and Benghazi last September. At the heart of the issue is the Africa Command, established in 2007, well before the Arab Spring uprisings and before an affiliate of Al Qaeda became […]

The October employment numbers deepened the gloom among African Americans and those (including the Via Meadia team) who believe that the United States as a whole cannot progress as it should unless African Americans are getting ahead too. As a report from Think Progress reminds us, in October, African American unemployment rose almost a full […]