Slowly but surely, Riyadh is beginning to look west. After years of comparatively modest engagement with the countries of East Africa, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is today putting in motion and ambitious strategy for engagement with the continent. In January, the heads of five East African nations (Sudan, Djibouti, Somalia, Eritrea, and Egypt) and three Middle Eastern ones (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Jordan) gathered in the Saudi capital to sign the Red Sea Pact, a new framework for enhanced trade and diplomacy along the Red Sea corridor. The agreement, some three years in the making, lays the groundwork for what Saudi officials hope will become a new cooperative regime for the area.

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Lebanon announced this month it was defaulting on all of its outstanding debt payments for the year, including $1.2 billion in eurobonds due in March. There are another $3.4 billion worth of eurobonds coming due after that. Those, too, will go unpaid.

It's a burgeoning crisis that deserves attention — but it does not warrant the blind bailout that Beirut is trying to secure.

The defaults come as no surprise. The foreign currency reserves of Lebanon's central bank are running on fumes. Beirut must now negotiate with bondholders to restructure its debt. Desperate for cash, the government seeks billions of dollars in assistance and handouts from international donors, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.

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The International Criminal Court has closed its doors but only temporarily. When the coronavirus pandemic subsides, the ICC will be back in business. And a bad business it is.

If you're not familiar with the ICC, let me enlighten you: It began life 18 years ago, established by the Rome Statute, a multilateral treaty. Its promoters promised it would be a court of last resort, bringing to justice perpetrators of such heinous crimes as genocide. Skeptics predicted it would become another expensive international bureaucracy, usurping power, accountable to no democratic entity.

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The Chinese government has been fast-tracking shipments of medical aid to Europe, which has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic that first emerged in the Chinese city of Wuhan. The largesse appears to be part of a public relations effort by Chinese President Xi Jinping and his Communist Party to deflect criticism over their responsibility for the deadly outbreak.

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For the past 50 years, the nation's leading biodefense laboratory has been at the forefront of combatting infectious-disease threats to the United States. But the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), at Fort Detrick, Maryland, has been largely missing in action from the fight to contain the coronavirus. So far, more than 22,000 people in America have been diagnosed with the virus, and more than 280 have died from the respiratory disease associated with Covid-19. U.S. infection rates are likely to climb precipitously as more testing becomes available.

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Losing a parent is always difficult, especially as important financial and religious arrangements must be made during a time of intense grief. A global pandemic doesn't help. But when my mother died on March 3, my family still had no idea how difficult it would be to stay safe while still honoring her in the Jewish tradition.

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The necessity of a Jewish nation state was a foundational premise for the founding fathers of Zionism, no matter what their political persuasion. That understanding was once shared by most American Jews, particularly in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Today, however, the idea of Jewish statehood is no longer a unifying principle but a wedge issue for American Jews.

In his address to the Zionist Congress in London on August 2, 1900, Theodor Herzl said:

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WHEN BOSTON police officers declared an illegal strike in September 1919, Massachusetts Governor Calvin Coolidge condemned the men for "desertion of duty," and upheld the decision of the commissioner of police to fire the strikers and hire replacements. "There is no right to strike against the public safety," he declared, "by anybody, anywhere, any time."

Coolidge's resolute stand made him a national hero overnight. In November he was reelected in a landslide. A year later he was Warren Harding's running mate on the GOP national ticket, and won election to the White House in his own right in 1924.

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Part 1 in a series

Much of modern environmental activism, which owes more to zealotry than evidence, has spawned a nasty perversion — let's call it the Pseudo-Scientific Method. As employed by environmental campaigners and the activist scientists who enable them, it has little to do with scientific discovery or the accumulation of knowledge; rather, it is "advocacy research" that creates "evidence" to support a pre-determined public policy — usually, inappropriate regulation or even bans.

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"Trump has betrayed the Syrian Kurds" — so goes a popular refrain regarding the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the areas of northeast Syria held by the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). The events that have followed — namely, a Turkish invasion of parts of SDF territory along the border and the deployment of Syrian government forces in some SDF areas — have been characterized as a strategic disaster for American interests, with some commentators even proclaiming the withdrawal as indicative of a U.S. imperial decline and U.S. disengagement from the Middle East.

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