Egypt has decided to act against radical Islamists in Sinai, killing twenty in the most recent strike. The Financial Times has details: Overnight, Egyptian military helicopters fired missiles around Shaikh Zuwaid, a village 10km from the border with Gaza. Eyewitnesses were quoted as saying they saw two military planes flying over the town and heard […]

Heavy new taxes on les riches are prompting many to think about getting out of France, reports the NYT: President François Hollande is vowing to impose a 75 percent tax on the portion of anyone’s income above a million euros ($1.24 million) a year. . . .A chill is wafting over France’s business class as Mr. […]

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the American South and Midwest are surging ahead of the Northeast and West Coast in job offerings. WSJ: A regional breakdown of the figures shows significant variation across the country. In the Midwest, hiring is up nearly 38% in the recovery, and the hiring rate — the number of […]

The storm thrashing the debt ridden economies of America and Europe seems to have made landfall in the Caribbean. The Financial Times reports: The decline in tourism – and the closure of its struggling sugar industry in 2005 – contributed to tipping St Kitts and Nevis over the fiscal cliff this year. With debts equivalent […]

We thought we’d plumbed the depths of political sleaze and voter rip-offs in California, but it turns out things there are even worse than we thought. Take a look at this story that comes from the Voice of San Diego: Last year the Poway Unified School District made a deal: It borrowed $105 million from […]

By Roger BerkowitzConspiracies are everywhere. From the President’s birthplace to U.S. involvement in 9/11, conspiracy theorists rule the airwaves. It is easy to mock those who purvey false certainties, but that should not stop us from taking them seriously. When people feel threatened and uneasy, in times of spiritual homelessness and economic dislocation, there is […]

Most of us outside the bubble think that the mainstream media is pretty pro-Obama. We remember all those comparisons to Lincoln and FDR in the heady early days of the administration.But apparently that’s not how it looks from the Oval Office; the president thinks he’s not getting a fair shot from the press. The New […]

Charles Darwin published his culture-shaking Origin of Species in 1859. It immediately provoked a passionate controversy. This is hardly surprising. The Darwinian culture shock can be compared to an earlier one: the Copernican one. Copernicus made people see the earth as one of several planets circling the sun, rather than as the center of the […]

A new Gallup poll confirms what we already suspected at Via Meadia: despite incessant insinuations in the MSM that life among the Latter Day Saints could be anything other than a hell on earth, Mormon Utah is the most pleasant state in the union to live in. More than half a million Americans were asked […]

Gu Kailai, wife of the purged Bo Xilai, is expected to go on trial on Thursday for the murder of British businessman and family fixer Neil Heywood. Bo was the former party secretary (effectively the mayor) of Chongqing, where Heywood was found poisoned in a hotel room last November.The scandal has shaken the Communist Party […]