Welcome to the frontline of sectarian warfare: Tripoli, North Lebanon. In Jabal Mohsen and Bab al Tabbaneh, violent clashes between Alawite and Sunni neighbours erupt every few weeks. These two slum communities have been slugging it out since the 1970s. Neither has the energy or will to escape the futile, bloody conflict that has come to define them both. A mother of two would rather hide her children in darkness than flee the city: "Even if they enter our houses, we will slaughter them, kill them: it's either us or them". Abu Rami is one of the 50,000 people crammed onto the hilltop called Jabal Muhsin. "My enemy and their enemy is hunger, poverty and ignorance. My enemy is not the guns they hold and fire at me". So says this war-weary veteran they call 'the living martyr', thirty-five years a militia leader - a gunman since his teens. Down below in the predominantly Sunni district of Bab al Tabbaneh, Salafist preacher and father Sheikh Bilal al-Masri is trigger-happy and eager for a fight. "I've only witnessed death and killings, jail, torture, displacement, rape looting" he says of the Syrian regime. As the conflict seems to pass on from each generation, the population can only hope for a common solution to emerge from the carnage.

Out to earn a dollar on the Russian natural resource trade, European nations such as the Netherlands have long kept smiling as the Kremlin has continued to humiliate them. But now the airline disaster, combined with Moscow’s attempts to cover up its role in the tragedy, will likely force Europe to get real about its eastern neighbor. 

A Dutch flag hangs at half-mast as a sign of respect for those killed in the downed Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, July 19, 2014. (David van Dam / Courtesy Reuters) 

Israel is now as strong as it is going to be. But Israel does not think that it can reach an accommodation with the Palestinians that would guarantee Israeli national security, a view based on a realistic reading of geography. Therefore, Israel sees little purpose in making concessions to the Palestinians despite its relative position of strength.

Serious nations need clear-thinking, mature, down-to-earth leaders. Somehow America and Russia have blundered into extremely risky leaders who can’t think straight.

The conservative case for the principles of the American founding is neither that they are old, nor that they American, nor that they are congenial to our prejudices, but that they are right and, in their implications, good, a reliable rallying point for reformation toward a better common life, challenging our (and their) compromises with justice.

Glance about — Central America, Venezuela, China, Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, Gaza, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Turkey, etc. — and the world outside the West is mostly a nasty place.  The three common denominators in all these catastrophes are the usual demagogic leaders blaming someone else for their people’s own self-inflicted miseries, a comfortable West that shrugs that somehow all these depressing things and mean people will just go away — and a tired global enforcer whose community organizer leader went into retirement and offers “make no mistake about it” warnings between swings on the golf course.

In practice—and practice is what the refusers pick up on—contemporary feminism neither is nor was about simple equality. In practice, it is anti-domestic, anti-men, and frankly anti-woman. And if declared feminists bothered to look back and examine their own movement as critically as they do young starlets’ statements, they would find a history radically different from the notion that “women are people, too.”

I would assert that parts of the world are aflame with Islamist militancy—and that we are in the crosshairs.  Wishing away the terrorist threat we face at home or abroad will not make it disappear. Indeed, worse, we are at risk of creating complacency at home and abroad about this growing threat. (Peter Brookes)

Russian President Vladimir Putin's government must pay $50 billion for using tax claims to destroy Yukos, once the country's largest oil producer, and its Kremlin-critical CEO, an international court has ruled.

In the aftermath of the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Ukraine, there has been no shortage of shameful behavior: the appalling disrespect shown to the remains of victims; the games played to delay an independent inspection of the crash; the crude mendacity of the Kremlin’s efforts to divert responsibility. And then there has been the response -- more accurately, the lack thereof -- of European leaders. After meeting this week to discuss further sanctions on Russia for President Vladimir Putin's aggression in Ukraine, European Union foreign ministers returned to one of their favorite pastimes: squabbling over which country has been most feckless in its failure to act. 

Classic garden-variety 1960s hippies loved to celebrate feminism, radical environmentalism, and “fairness,” just like today’s progressives, and they certainly weren’t immune from groupthink. But they were also strikingly anti-establishment.  They celebrated nonconformists. They demanded “power to the people,” advocated rebellion, and never, ever trusted “The Man”—at least, as it’s now a cliché to point out, until they got older and actually became “The Man.”

The minimum wage should be the easiest issue to understand for the economically savvy. If the government arbitrarily sets a floor for wages above that set by the market, jobs will be lost. Even the Congressional Budget Office admits that 500,000 jobs would be lost with a $10.10 federal minimum wage. Who knows how high the real number would be?

To deliberately wage war so that your own people can be telegenically killed is indeed moral and tactical insanity. But it rests on a very rational premise: Given the Orwellian state of the world’s treatment of Israel (see: the U.N.’s grotesque Human Rights Council), fueled by a mix of classic anti-Semitism, near-total historical ignorance and reflexive sympathy for the ostensible Third World underdog, these eruptions featuring Palestinian casualties ultimately undermine support for Israel’s legitimacy and right to self-defense.

So far there is no sign of shock or shame in Russia. But in truth, this tragedy offers Vladimir Putin an opportunity to get out of the messy disaster he has created in eastern Ukraine. He now has the perfect excuse to denounce the separatist movement and to cut its supplies. If he refuses, then we know that he remains profoundly dedicated to the chaos and nihilism he created in Donetsk. We can assume he intends to perpetuate it elsewhere. And if we are not prepared to fight it, we should be braced for it to spread.

As part of the inaugural Hoover Institution Library and Archives' Workshop on Political Economy, Professor Angus Burgin of Johns Hopkins University gave the keynote lecture titled "Hayek, Friedman, and the Return of Laissez-Faire." The lecture was based on Burgin's book T"he Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Great Depression", which features many collections from the Hoover Institution Archives, including the papers of Milton Friedman, Friedrich von Hayek, and the Mont Pèlerin Society records.

Higher education exists to advance and transmit knowledge, and learning requires disagreement and argument. Even the most vocational curriculum -- accounting, physical therapy, civil engineering, graphic design -- represents knowledge accumulated through trial and error, experimentation and criticism. That open-ended process isn’t easy and it often isn’t comfortable. The idea that students should be protected from disagreeable ideas is a profoundly anti-educational concept. 

What a strange couple the Clintons became: the feminist president who was a serial groper and ace harasser; the feminist secretary of State who chortled in recall about an old sexual battery case in which she got a rapist off easy, and whose advisors reduced Bill’s liaisons to trailer trash or nuts; the two populists who cashed in; the middle-class  defenders who fawned over Wall Street; and on and on.

Let’s discuss 2 stories about immigration law enforcement and the danger of adopting these stories uncritically.

In Kabul a small group of young women have filmed their own lives over two years. These intimate diaries reveal the adversity that girls face in one of the world's most conservative countries. "A girl has to fight for her rights from the day she's born until the day she dies", explains Nargis. She and her friends bravely spread the message of equality in a country where the hanging and beheading of women remains commonplace. Facing conservative jibes for walking out without head scarves or for driving a car, these girls must also deal with the bigger worry of random terrorist attacks: "Who knows whether we'll be the next victims", they say.