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To understand the moment, one has to understand the extent to which many religious activists believe that free speech itself is responsible for America’s ongoing secularization and alleged moral decline. They believe the doctrine of viewpoint neutrality — that is, the requirement that the government treat private speakers equally in their access to government facilities — is a proxy for “moral relativism.” Moral relativism is a truly poisonous accusation in conservative and Christian communities, in part because it implies a rejection of immutable or universal truth in favor of a subjective, individual standard — a concept alien, for example, to traditional Christianity.

As a free speech advocate, I’ve been fending off the “moral relativism” accusation for years. In 2019, when I wrote in support of the right of drag queens to enjoy the same access to public facilities as anyone else, that was “moral relativism.” When I wrote earlier this month that the right of free speech includes even the right to calls for non-imminent violence — again, this is a matter of settled constitutional law — a scholar named John Grondelski wrote in a Catholic journal that my position was “the offspring of the dictatorship of relativism.”

much of my legal career was dedicated to protecting minority religious expression — including evangelical expression — from censorship on American campuses and in American communities. In the course of that representation, I learned three practical truths of free expression.

Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.

Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.

“If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”

“I think that we have reached a moment when the Israeli authorities will have to define more clearly what their final objective is,” President Emmanuel Macron of France said this month. “The total destruction of Hamas? Does anybody think that’s possible? If it’s that, the war will last 10 years.”

Since it first emerged in 1987, Hamas has survived repeated attempts to eliminate its leadership. The organization’s very structure was designed to absorb such contingencies, according to political and military specialists

In addition, Israel’s devastating tactics in the Gaza war threaten to radicalize a broader segment of the population, inspiring new recruits.

Even a temporary ceasefire displays the moral power of peacemakin

On both sides, the celebrations were tempered by an awareness of those still in captivity. Hamas freed children and their mothers but not their fathers, and elderly women but not their husbands. The two hundred and forty prisoners whom Israel released were, according to the Jerusalem-based human-rights group B’ Tselem, a fraction of the nearly five thousand Palestinians held on security grounds as of September

Ceasefires usually don’t end wars, because they don’t address the issues that underlie them.

But all these questions miss the point, the Buddha tells his disciple. What is important is pulling out that poison arrow, and tending to the wound.

“We need to be moved by the pain of all of the suffering. But it is important that we are not paralyzed by it,” Ms. Han said. “It makes us value life because we understand life is very precious, life is very brief, it can be extinguished in a single instant.”

Recent days have revealed an arrow lodged deep in the heart of America. It was exposed in the slaughter of 19 elementary school children and two teachers in Uvalde, and when a gunman steeped in white supremacist ideology killed 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket. The United States is a nation that has learned to live with mass shooting after mass shooting.

For years, opium has been the monster too big to slay. One Afghan government after another has pledged to stamp out opium production and trafficking, only to prove unable to resist billions of dollars in illicit profits.

But after the U.S.-led invasion in 2001, opium taxes and smuggling helped fuel the Taliban’s own 20-year insurgency.

The Taliban announced on April 3 that poppy cultivation had been outlawed, with violators to be punished under Shariah law.

Though sex work is legal in the country, those who practice it often endure harassment and abuse. The justices urged the authorities to employ a more nuanced and humane approach.

Zareena was inside her room at a brothel in Mumbai’s vast red-light district when police officers burst in, she recalled recently, looking for a woman thought to be a victim of sex trafficking.

But, she said, once there, she herself was detained, despite having committed no crime. She spent that night in 2019, like so many others over the years, inside a lockup.

After he was shot dead, police found as many as 1,657 rounds of ammunition and 60 magazines in his possession.

The Buffalo, New York, shooter, also 18, had previously come into contact with authorities, but no red flags came up when he legally bought his own AR-15-style weapon."Why should anyone be able to buy a weapon that can kill other human beings without at least knowing, 'Hey, has that person committed a violent crime before? Are they a threat against themselves or others? That's just reasonable," Ms Harris said on Saturday.

Before travelling to Uvalde, Mr Biden told students in Delaware that it was still possible to "make America safer" but as he seeks cross-party support for tighter gun regulations, he's in direct conflict with leading Republicans who blame the problem on issues of school security and mental health, rather than guns.As such, meaningful bipartisan co-operation looks very unlikely. Such questions, however, may well be paused for a few hours in Uvalde while he

“This, too, is a decision we have made that ensures Ukraine’s security with the most modern equipment,”

The speed and scale of weapons donations to Ukraine has been a persistent source of criticism for Mr. Scholz both from Ukraine and from inside Germany, even as he has spoken of breaking with decades of pacifist policy.

In addition, Germany has taken in 168 “especially severely wounded” Ukrainian soldiers for medical treatment, Mr. Scholz said.

The book, “A Trail of Crab Tracks,” explores the birth of independent Cameroon in the 1960s and its subsequent descent into civil war. Nganang, 52, wanted to get the details just right, from the experience of guerrilla fighters in the jungle to the names of plants and local rivers.“I was very careful,” Nganang said last month as a torrential spring rain fell outside his New Jersey home. “I didn’t want an older person to read it and say, ‘Come on, my son. It’s not right!’” His laughter, like a thunderclap, filled the room.

“The government was declaring war and cracking down on Anglophone protests,” he says. “They hadn’t started killing yet.”

Finally released and expelled from the country, Nganang emerged with a deeper commitment to his overarching project: an examination of Cameroon’s national identity, and how it has held within it the seeds of both great promise and disappointment.

Suddenly, five low-flying helicopters thrummed overhead, some firing weapons and drawing gunfire in return. Villagers ran for their lives. But there was nowhere to escape: The helicopters were dropping soldiers on the town’s outskirts to block all the exits.

In Moura, the security forces “may have also raped, looted, arrested and arbitrarily detained many civilians,” according to the mission, which is preparing a report on the incident.

However, using satellite imagery, The New York Times identified the sites of at least two mass graves, which matched the witnesses’ descriptions of where captives were executed and buried.

in the past decade or so, human rights have pretty much disappeared from our politics. Throughout the 9/11 wars, the grotesque contradiction between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of tortured prisoners, civilian casualties, and grinding conflict corrupted the cause beyond remedy

After Iraq and Afghanistan, no president can send young men and women to war by invoking human rights. When Barack Obama refrained from punishing Bashar al-Assad of Syria for murdering thousands of innocent people with poison gas, there was no outcry from the general public.

With the eclipse of U.S. prestige and power, the decay of liberal democracy, and the rising appeal of authoritarian regimes, there’s no longer any mechanism—neither military force nor threat of sanctions and isolation, nor global pressure campaigns by civil-society groups—to make the world’s dictators hesitate before they throw people into concentration camps.

It is men and women like Bildt, who believe that the international order is secured by pen and ink, who have been living in a fantasy land. They have spent a generation inviting catastrophe into their sitting rooms.

They watched Putin jail and destroy Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the richest man in Russia.They watched Putin assassinate dissidents on the ground in NATO countries.They watched Putin’s army commit war crimes in Chechnya.They watched his 2007 Munich speech in which he literally said, out loud, that he wanted to roll back the Westernization of Eastern Europe and restore Russia’s dominance.They watched the invasions of Georgia and then Ukraine.

In response these same men and women decommissioned nuclear power plants in Europe and built gas pipelines to Russia so that they could have good feelings about “environmentalism” while also pocketing economic windfalls.They crossed their fingers and closed their eyes.You tell me who “lost contact with reality.”

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Linda Thomas-GreenfieldLinda Thomas-GreenfieldRussia delivers written response to US over Ukraine-related proposal US, Russia face off over Ukraine at Security Council meeting The Hill's Morning Report - What's Putin's next move? MORE, on Tuesday characterized the recent U.N. Security Council meeting on Ukraine as an "absolute success."

When asked how the public meeting affected efforts to resolve tensions through quiet diplomacy, Thomas-Greenfield said it was "one more diplomatic effort to give the Russians an opportunity to explain what they are doing on the border with Ukraine."

Russia denies that it has plans to invade but has issued security ultimatums to the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization that include denying Ukraine any entrance to the alliance in the future and committing to never placing offensive arms in the former Soviet state.

A full Russian invasion would be Europe’s biggest war since the 1940s, and the first toppling since then of a democratically elected European government by a foreign invader.

Russians would not only suffer casualties, especially during a long-running insurgency, but also cause the death of untold Ukrainians—fellow Slavs, with whom many have family ties.

War would affect the prices of other commodities, too. Oil is already spiking. Russia is the world’s largest exporter of wheat, with Ukraine close behind. Russia is a big source of metals: in today’s tight markets even a small shock could send commodity prices upwards.

LL OF SOUTH KOREA’S past presidents have been tainted by corruption investigations.

Politicians usually manage to get elected before becoming mired in scandals.

Both Lee Jae-myung of the ruling Minjoo Party and Yoon Seok-youl of the conservative opposition People Power Party (PPP) have been accused of serious wrongdoing since the campaign began. The pair deny any misdeeds. Yet each camp has tried to find advantage in the other’s adversity. With just six weeks to go, the campaign has been heavy on mudslinging and light on serious debate.

Over the months that Russia amassed more than 100,000 troops on the borders of Ukraine

Ukraine is vulnerable to a major cyber attack

Ukraine has repeatedly been a target of cyberattacks, especially since the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. In the years since Crimea's annexation — which is unrecognized by the international community — near-constant cyber warfare, much of it from Russia, has targeted almost every sector in Ukraine, from its power grid to its treasury to its media companies.

What some commentators abroad see as appeasement, cowardice and the triumph of economic interests over security concerns, many Germans see as a grown-up, sensible and conciliatory approach to foreign policy. (A recent poll found that 59 percent of Germans supported the decision not to send arms to Kyiv.) Germans view themselves as enlightened, having moved beyond power politics, the national interest and militarism.

The idea of deterrence, or of the military being an element of geopolitical power needed for strong diplomacy, is foreign to most German citizens.

y she is referring to. They read the 20th century, and 1933-1945 in particular, as a lesson in the evils of geopolitics and militarism, and they internalized the post-1989 “end of history” narrative better than anyone else.

this week, let’s talk about his enemy, Vladimir Putin: why he’s a common villain, and why men like him are ubiquitous in human history. They rise and fall with almost metronomic regularity, not just because there are always men who are drawn to absolute power and military glory, but because these men connect with specific human needs and unlock the darkness in human hearts. 

as recently as ten days ago significant figures in the United States and the west obviously and openly admired Putin, including Donald Trump, the former president and frontrunner for the GOP nomination. Days before the Russian Army launched its unprovoked attack on Ukraine, Tucker Carlson, the most popular cable news host in America, was so pro-Putin that his remarks were rebroadcast on Russian state media. 

In 2017 Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered an address to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, entitled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” Hillsdale, for those who don’t know, is arguably the premier conservative college in America.

Even in his speech announcing the invasion, Putin referred to his oft-stated belief that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. This, of course, was never true — even when they lived side by side in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. The two identities and cultures are distinct. But Russians and Ukrainians are the closest of kin. Even when we speak different languages, as we have increasingly done since Putin annexed Crimea in 2014, we understand each other. But Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy made the most of his eloquent speech on the eve of the invasion by speaking in Russian, directly appealing to Russian citizens with the ease of someone who shares a cultural code with them. It runs thick as blood and has nothing to do with official Soviet avowals of brotherhood.

A lot of evidence pointed to Putin's intention to invade. But I kept hoping he would stop at the last moment, because a full-scale attack on Ukraine, guaranteed to spill the blood of Ukrainian civilians, is the worst war crime a Russian can possibly commit. Even the inevitable parallels with Hitler’s 1938 Anschluss of Austria, which I drew before when Putin took Crimea and when he published his historical screed assailing Ukraine as an “anti-Russian project,” do not do justice to what happened in the early hours of Feb. 24.

To make the curse permanent, God marked Cain to make sure no one would kill him to end his suffering. Russia, with the nuclear arsenal Putin keeps bragging about, also bears a kind of Cain’s mark now. It is not Putin who is cursed now —  it’s all of us Russians. Our identity, wherever we are, will be tainted by this invasion, by our failure to stop the dictator long before he crossed this unspeakable line.