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An unbridgeable gap has opened between American Jews and Israeli Jews

An unbridgeable gap has opened between American Jews and Israeli Jews

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Jonathan Weisman writes: The events of the past year brought American and Israeli Jews ever closer to a breaking point. President Trump, beloved in Israel and decidedly unloved by a majority of American Jews, moved the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May, with the fiery evangelical pastors John Hagee and Robert Jeffress consecrating the ceremony. In October, after the murder of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, President Trump went to that…

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Arab states move to reconcile with Syria

Arab states move to reconcile with Syria

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Deutsche Welle reports: Nearly eight years into a devastating war and with victory in sight, Syrian President Bashar Assad looks set to be freed from his isolation in the Arab world in 2019. Syria was booted out of the Arab League seven years ago as Arab states recalled their ambassadors, and Gulf Arab states shuttered their embassies to isolate the Assad regime amid a crackdown on protesters and descent into civil war. Now Arab states are seeking to reconcile with…

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China’s gulag for Muslims

China’s gulag for Muslims

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Mustafa Akyol writes: One of the darkest episodes of the 20th century was the gulag — the Soviet system of forced labor camps where dissidents were imprisoned in terrible conditions, often to perish. The camps were established by Lenin, expanded by Stalin and finally exposed to the world by the great Russian author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, with his 1973 masterpiece, “The Gulag Archipelago.” “Thin strands of human lives stretch from island to island of Archipelago,” he wrote, and “it is enough…

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Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

Why China’s electric-car industry is leaving Detroit, Japan, and Germany in the dust

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Jordyn Dahl writes: After the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s crippled China’s economy, the country began to open its markets to the outside world. The aim was to bring in technological know-how from abroad that domestic firms could then assimilate. By the early ’80s, foreign automakers were allowed in on the condition that they form a joint venture with a Chinese partner. These Chinese firms, by working with foreign companies, would eventually gain enough knowledge to function independently….

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William Arkin’s farewell memo

William Arkin’s farewell memo

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In his farewell memo, NBC military analyst William Arkin writes: When the attacks of 9/11 came, I was called back to NBC. I spent weeks on and off the air talking about al Qaeda and the various wars we were rushing into, arguing that airpower and drones would be the centerpiece not troops. In the new martial environment where only one war cry was sanctioned I was out of sync then as well. I retreated somewhat to writing a column…

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Paul Whelan probably isn’t a spy. So why did Russia detain him?

Paul Whelan probably isn’t a spy. So why did Russia detain him?

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Siobhán O’Grady and Amie Ferris-Rotman report: According to Russia’s domestic security services, a former U.S. Marine named Paul Whelan was in Moscow on a “spy mission” when he was arrested there last week. But experts say Whelan’s detention doesn’t look like a spying case at all. Whelan received a bad-conduct discharge from the Marines in 2008, according to military records. He is now the corporate security director at BorgWarner, a Michigan-based automotive parts supplier, and his family said he was…

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Large Magellanic Cloud on collision course with Milky Way — in 2.5 billion years

Large Magellanic Cloud on collision course with Milky Way — in 2.5 billion years

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The Guardian reports: As if battered post-Christmas finances, a looming disorderly Brexit and the prospect of a fresh nuclear arms race were not enough to dampen spirits, astronomers have declared that a nearby galaxy will slam into the Milky Way and could knock our solar system far into the cosmic void. The unfortunate discovery was made after scientists ran computer simulations on the movement of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), one of the many satellite galaxies that orbits the Milky…

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Climate change is already here

Climate change is already here

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Carolyn Gramling writes: The grim reality of climate change grabbed center stage in 2018. This is the year we learned that the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming won’t be enough to forestall significant impacts of climate change. And a new field of research explicitly attributed some extreme weather events to human-caused climate change. This one-two punch made it clear that climate change isn’t just something to worry about in the coming decades. It’s already here. This looming problem was…

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Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

Yuval Noah Harari sees a big-data threat to humanity

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Steve Paulson interviews historian Yuval Noah Harari: What’s different about this moment in history? What’s different is the pace of technological change, especially the twin revolutions of artificial intelligence and bioengineering. They make it possible to hack human beings and other organisms, and then re-engineer them and create new life forms. How far can this technology go in changing who we are? Very far. Beyond our imagination. It can change our imagination, too. If your imagination is too limited to…

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The denial of climate change and the denial of racism rest on the same foundation

The denial of climate change and the denial of racism rest on the same foundation

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Ibram X. Kendi writes: For two years, they formed a community of experts, about 1,000 in all, including 300 leading climate scientists inside and outside 13 federal agencies. For two years, they volunteered their time and expertise to produce the Fourth National Climate Assessment. There is no parallel process to tackle the questions I study; there is no ongoing national racial assessment mandated by a law summarizing the impact of racism on the United States, now and in the future….

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Time to get out of Afghanistan

Time to get out of Afghanistan

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Robert D. Kaplan writes: The decision by President Trump to withdraw 7,000 of the roughly 14,000 American troops left in Afghanistan, possibly by summer, has raised new concerns about his impulsive behavior, especially given his nearly simultaneous decision to pull out all American forces from Syria against the advice of Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. But the downsizing of the Afghan mission was probably inevitable. Indeed, it may soon be time for the United States to get out of the country…

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Trump gives no timetable for Syria exit, wants to protect Kurds

Trump gives no timetable for Syria exit, wants to protect Kurds

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Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump said on Wednesday the United States would get out of Syria “over a period of time” and wants to protect the U.S.-backed Kurdish fighters in the country as Washington draws down troops. Trump did not provide a timetable for the planned military exit from Syria, which he announced last month against the advice of top national security aides and without consulting lawmakers or U.S. allies participating in anti-Islamic State operations. The decision prompted Defence…

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Brazil is about to show the world how a modern democracy collapses

Brazil is about to show the world how a modern democracy collapses

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Travis Waldron reports: The tanks began to roll into Rio de Janeiro on the morning of April 1, 1964, some of them from the neighboring state of Minas Gerais, others from São Paulo. The Brazilian capital had moved to Brasília, the new planned city in the country’s interior, a few years prior, but Rio remained the effective center of power, and somewhere in the city, President João Goulart was clinging to power. Goulart, a leftist who became president in 1961,…

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It could take over 200 years for women to reach economic equality

It could take over 200 years for women to reach economic equality

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CNBC reports: The gender gap is narrowing, but there’s still a long way to go before parity is reached. How long? The 2018 Global Gender Gap Report, released by the World Economic Forum (WEF), estimates that it will take 202 years for economic equality between men and women to be achieved around the world. The report benchmarks how countries perform across four dimensions: economic participation and opportunity, educational attainment, health and survival, and political empowerment. The organization estimates that the…

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