As usual, I was struck by two seemingly unrelated items reported by Religion News Service on February 28, 2013. I think they are worth being reflected upon together.The first story is about an action by the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which has decided to charge seven ultra-Orthodox Jewish businesses with gender discrimination. […]

One of the primary foreign policy dilemmas facing the second Obama Administration is whether to make a concerted push for Israeli-Palestinian peace, possibly including presentation of a U.S. peace plan, the ultimate form of American involvement, or conversely, to maintain the standoff approach that followed the failed attempts of its first year in office. President […]

Eleven month old baby Omar died horribly and tragically during Israel’s eight day bombardment of the Gaza Strip last November. A striking and heart-wrenching photograph of his distraught father became a centerpiece in the usual and predictable Hate-Israel campaign accompanying the military strike. Baby Omar, the son of BBC journalist Jihad al-Masharawi, died with two relatives, […]

Whether you’re a magnate or a menial worker, nowadays it’s vastly more difficult to find a spouse in China.In the wake of rapid modernization, wealth inequality has spiked, more women are pursuing careers, the skewed gender gap has produced a growing surplus of single men, and family and social networks have frayed as millions of […]

Gaia seems to like fossil fuels much more than many of her followers. Earlier today, Japan announced that it successfully accessed ocean deposits of a new, relatively clean-burning, and hyper-abundant energy source: fire ice. More accurately called methane hydrate, fire ice exists under Arctic permafrost and deep underwater, primarily on seabeds along continental shelves. Up […]

Sudan and its recently jettisoned neighbor, South Sudan, have agreed to restart oil production and exports in no more than four weeks. South Sudan shut down oil production in January 2012 over a dispute with its northern neighbor. This exacted a heavy toll on both countries, whose economies rely heavily on oil export revenues but […]

Disgraced ex-Mayor and shameless identity politician Kwame Kilpatrick has been convicted on twenty-four counts of extortion, racketeering, and bribery. The stunningly corrupt politician, who looted from Detroit’s poor and needy to pay for a life of luxury he never earned, is going to jail. His life is ruined, and his family has been shamed.It’s only […]

Illinois’ pension troubles have just taken a criminal turn. The SEC hit the state with charges of securities fraud yesterday, claiming that Illinois repeatedly misled investors about the state of its pension programs over the past decade. Between 2005 and 2009, the state issued $2.2 billion dollars in bonds while claiming that its pension funds were […]

As the posthumous trial of Sergei Magnitsky got underway in Moscow yesterday (and then didn’t), it’s worth thinking about what’s driving Vladimir Putin to such bizarre ends. Why put a dead man on trial, after all?A good place to start thinking about such things is AEI scholar Leon Aron’s article in Foreign Affairs from this weekend. Titled […]

The US and China continue to bicker about hacking, and on the surface relations with China remain tense. This is a problem in itself but also a problem because of what it says about China’s response to Obama’s vaunted “pivot to Asia”: China is hanging tough and pushing the US where it thinks it can.The […]