With about 300,000 inhabitants, Stockton, California would be the largest city in the history of the United States to go belly up. This is likely to happen on Tuesday; the city has huge debts for white elephant development projects along with massive unfunded retirement and health care obligations, and its tax revenues have gone down […]

Philippine fishermen charged yesterday that a ship which “looked Chinese” rammed their fishing boat in waters near the disputed Scarborough Shoal. The boat sank; four of the crew are still missing and one died after being taken to a hospital on shore.The incident comes barely days after a standoff between the Philippine and Chinese fleets […]

The latest Gallup polling on Americans’ attitudes towards a Mormon presidential candidate offers some good news and some bad. The bad news is that liberal anti-Mormonism–a politically opportunistic breed of bigotry that has exploded with the rise of Mitt Romney, and which we have tracked carefully at Via Meadia–remains potent. Per Gallup: Negativity toward a […]

Via Meadia has often made clear our supreme confidence that Iran would use the bomb responsibly, if at all, should the peace-loving mullahs manage to develop it. The Guardian reports more news of a confidence-building nature: A multinational investigation into bomb plots targeting Israeli diplomats earlier this year has produced the clearest evidence yet that […]

Trees may not grow to the sky, but they can tell tall tales about their height.That at least is what we can infer from this piece in the New York Times, where reporter Keith Bradsher inspects some recent economic signals coming out of China.  The closer he looks, the less reliable those statistics appear.Many China […]

As activists in Rio and around the world mourned the failure of yet another useless summit to do anything about climate change, good news on the CO2 front was coming from the country greens love to hate: the US.While Europe has adopted a plethora of expensive laws without any significant effect on CO2 emissions, the […]

As the new American grand strategy in Asia unfold, the US is taking a fresh look at some of its Vietnam era bases. In earlier posts we’ve seen how the strategy involves new US bases in Australia and Singapore, as well as a return to Cold War era bases in the Philippines. Today’s Washington Post […]

The end of the world must be near; Sinn Fein’s leader in Northern Ireland, an ex-commander of the IRA, is set to shake hands with Queen Elizabeth II.Martin McGuiness, who serves as one of the two top officials in the arrangement that rules Northern Ireland in the United Kingdom, agreed on Friday to the meeting […]

Turks are known for a pugnacious, quickly roused nationalism; as a result, many observers have been predicting that Syria’s downing of a Turkish military jet yesterday could lead to greater Turkish pressure on Syria and even to military retaliation.But the news from Ankara this morning makes war less likely. Turkey’s President Abdullah Gul now says […]

Following last weekend’s disputed presidential election results, when the ruling military rejected early victory claims by the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate Mohammed Morsi, supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood have turned out in Cairo’s Tahrir Square to rally against the military. Last night, the protests hit its largest turnout, setting up an unprecedented showdown between the Muslim […]