RUTHFULLY YOURS

In a very interesting column the author states: “It turns out that, in the prehistory of our species, almost all of us were invaders and usurpers and miscegenators. This scientific revelation is interesting in its own right, but it may have the added benefit of encouraging people today to worry a bit less about cultural change, racial mixing and immigration.”….Oh Puleez!!! rsk
Armed with old bones and new DNA sequencing technology, scientists are getting a much better understanding of the prehistory of the human species.

Imagine what it must have been like to look through the first telescopes or the first microscopes, or to see the bottom of the sea as clearly as if the water were gin. This is how students of human prehistory are starting to feel, thanks to a new ability to study ancient DNA extracted from bodies and bones in archaeological sites.

Low-cost, high-throughput DNA sequencing—a technique in which millions of DNA base-pairs are automatically read in parallel—appeared on the scene less than a decade ago. It has already transformed our ability to see just how the genes of human beings, their domestic animals and their diseases have changed over thousands or tens of thousands of years.

The president wants to zero out a program that is saving poor kids from bad schools—the kind of reform that could work in Baltimore too.

The scenes of Baltimore set ablaze this week have many Americans thinking: What can be done to rescue families trapped in an inner-city culture of violence, despair and joblessness?

There are no easy answers, but down the road from Baltimore in Washington, D.C., an education program is giving children in poor neighborhoods a big lift up. The D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program, which George W. Bush signed into law in 2004, has so far funded private-school tuition for nearly 5,000 students, 95% of whom are African-American. They attend religious schools, music and arts schools, even elite college-prep schools. Last month at the Heritage Foundation in Washington, I met with about 20 parents and children who participate in the program. I also visited several of these families in their homes—which are located in some of the most beaten-down neighborhoods in the city, places that in many ways resemble the trouble spots in Baltimore.

Ruthie Blum is the web editor of Voice of Israel talk radio (voiceofisrael.com).

In 1983, four years after then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty, I became acquainted with a couple who lived in my Jerusalem apartment complex.

The husband was a teacher in the local elementary school; the wife worked for the Israel Electric Corporation.

Within minutes of our first encounter, it became apparent that they did not share my worldview. This was not a novel experience. On the contrary, I had come to expect secular Israelis, especially those with university degrees, to be somewhere on the Left.

Still, the couple in question turned out to be different from the others with whom I argued regularly about politics and economics, until more urgent issues, such as whether our babies had slept through the night, reminded us why we were friends in the first place.

Unlike the trendy Labor party liberals all over the neighborhood, who were buying up run-down Arab houses and renovating them with a vengeance (made possible through much hard-earned cash from their parents), this couple were bona fide, card-carrying communists. And their disdain for anyone less ideologically “pure” bordered on hatred.

Iran controls the strategic waterway through which 40 percent of seaborne oil and a quarter of seaborne gas transits to global markets.

The Maersk Tigris is flagged to the Marshall Islands. The South Pacific archipelago gained its independence from the US in 1986 after signing a treaty conceding its right to self-defense in exchange for US protection. According to the treaty, the US has “full authority and responsibility for security and defense of the Marshall Islands.”

Given the US’s formal, binding obligation to the Marshall Islands, the Iranian seizure of the ship was in effect an act of war against America.

In comments to Bloomberg hours after the ship was seized, Junior Aini, chargé d’affairs at the Marshall Islands Embassy in Washington, indicated that his government’s only recourse is to rely on the US to free its ship.

Irrespective of a cynical and gullible “elite” media, independent of diplomatic pressure, political correctness and conventional wisdom, in defiance of the global economic slowdown, in the face of war and terrorism, and despite ill-advised threats of boycott, divestment and sanctions – but, due to principle-driven tenacity, inherent optimism, human capital/brain power, creativity, cutting edge ingenuity and breakthrough, game-changing innovations – Israel’s economy is expanding beyond expectations, reacting constructively to pressures/challenges, and developing unique commercial and security niches in response to local and global needs.