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Christian, Yazidi Women Still in ISIS Captivity by Sirwan Kajjo

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

Despite losing control of Raqqa and other major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, ISIS continues to keep many of the women it kidnapped during its rise in 2014. The world seems to have forgotten about them.

Habib, traded four times during her captivity, witnessed many cases of Christian and Yazidi girls — some as young as 9 years old — sold, raped and tortured by ISIS members.

Currently, there are an estimated 1,500 Christian and Yazidi girls and women still in captivity, while 1,000 others are missing in Iraq and Syria. Others are believed to have been sold to sex traffickers in Turkey. It is an issue that the international community cannot ignore.

After more than three years, Rita Habib, a 30-year-old Christian woman from the Iraqi city of Mosul, was recently reunited with her blind father in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan Region. She and her father are the sole survivors of a family whose members, like thousands of Christians and other non-Muslims, was murdered by ISIS in mid-2014. Habib was among hundreds of Christian and Yazidi women and girls abducted at the time and sold into the sex trade. She was one of the lucky ones to be rescued by the Christian advocacy group, the Shlomo Organization for Documentation, which paid ISIS $30,000 for her release.

Abu Shujaa, a Yazidi activist who has been involved in rescuing hundreds of Yazidi women from ISIS, helps secure their release in various ways, but said that all require money, which is hard to come by.

When Raqqa, the former de facto capital of ISIS, was liberated by U.S.-backed and Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, many captured women were freed. Despite losing control of Raqqa and other major strongholds in Syria and Iraq, however, ISIS continues to enslave many of the women and girls it kidnapped during its rise in 2014. The world seems to have forgotten about them.

EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Palestinians and the Arabs By Robert Vincent

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

This past Friday, April 13th, I attended a small gathering at the University of Toledo campus, entitled, “Israel: Democracy or Apartheid State?,” sponsored by the local chapter of the notorious Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). The guest speaker was Josh Ruebner, Policy Director for the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights. It proved to be an educational experience for me.

The audience of around 30 people included primarily SJP members, with a few other curious, if sympathetic, students and non-students. Also present was Mike Galbraith, who is running as a Democrat for the 5th Congressional District (my district). when I arrived before the meeting began, Mr. Galbraith was engaged in a very friendly and animated discussion with Mr. Ruebner.

The talk initially centered on recent events in Gaza. Mr. Ruebner went on in great detail about gross violations of human rights allegedly carried out by Israeli forces in response to the ‘march of return’ currently being organized by Hamas, and Israeli oppression and discrimination against Palestinians in general. I have only once before experienced such an unending stream of undiluted vitriol directed at Israel, and that was during the UT student government BDS vote meeting I attended there two years ago.

One striking aspect of Mr. Ruebner diatribe was that he never made a single reference to any Palestinian leadership organization. The Palestinians were simply referred to as just that, a seemingly hapless collection of victims being targeted by Israel, with no leadership or representation of any kind; simply persecuted and deprived of their rights.

There was no reference made to the PA, the PLO, and certainly not to Hamas (I could not even get him to say the word; more on this in a moment). Of course, he also did not make any reference to the severe denial of Palestinian rights in other neighboring countries, at least until I forced him to address this during the Q&A portion; which brings us to the most revealing part of the event.

Most of the questions were sympathetic, as one would expect, given the composition of the audience. One woman, for example, asked how one could deal with the common perception that being critical of Israel was synonymous with being anti-Semitic. Here I saw a major opening, when it was my turn to participate.

I pointed out that Gaza is not simply bordered by Israel, but also by Egypt in the west. I described how Egypt had very tightly sealed the border there, and that even if all of his claims of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians were true – and I disputed these – how is it that only Israel is held responsible? I asked why he only wants to boycott Israel.

He replied that he would also like to boycott Egypt, so I laid out his real agenda, telling him and those gathered that he didn’t even mention Egypt until I brought it up, that his focus on only the Jewish state – of two states “oppressing” the Palestinians in Gaza – is a perfect example of how people like him are in fact promoting Jew hatred with their activities.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

The Adulthood Track Recent national test results make clear that schools should offer students training for the working world that doesn’t require a college degree. Ray Domanico

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

The results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), released this week, offer little to celebrate. Political leaders and education advocates are struggling to find evidence that their preferred policy—whatever it might be—is having much impact on student performance. Progress has stalled in recent years, and results at the state and national level are far below where most education policymakers thought they would be by now. Despite the efforts of George W. Bush, many children are still being left behind; despite the efforts of Barack Obama, the race to the top didn’t produce many winners.

Administered to a representative sample of youngsters, the NAEP is a rigorous test, the only instrument we have to make valid comparisons across states—and some major local school districts—and to track nationwide progress over time. The test sets a high bar for achievement: it defines “proficiency” as mastery of challenging subject matter, as distinguished from grade-level proficiency (good enough to pass). The NAEP results reveal that slightly more than a third of the nation’s eighth-graders were proficient in reading and math in 2017. These numbers have moved up slowly: since 2003, math proficiency is up five points, to 34 percent, and reading is up four points, to 36 percent. But the average eight-grade math score is currently 16 points below proficiency, while the average reading score falls 14 points short—discouraging figures, though better than 2003. If improvement continues at this glacial pace, it will be 45 years until the average eighth-grader is considered proficient in mathematics and 49 years for an average eighth-grader to achieve reading proficiency.

We should not be surprised by the NAEP findings, as they align with trends in college completion. Nationally, 84 percent of high school students graduate, and of those, about 70 percent enroll in a two- or four-year college. But college-completion rates are just 60 percent for four-year colleges and 30 percent for two-year colleges. Overall, only about 30 percent of the students who start out in the American K-12 system complete a college degree by age 25. Students who plan to complete college should be scoring at the NAEP’s proficiency levels by eighth grade; two-thirds are not doing so.

ISRAEL Comments turned off

Israel At 70

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

Cherry tomatoes were engineered in Israel.
Israel is the only county to have more trees today than it did 50 years ago.
After Tokyo and New York City, Tel Aviv has the most sushi restaurants per capita.
People of the book: Israel publishes more books per capita than any other country.
Israel has the world’s highest rate of entrepreneurship among women.
Israel has the highest number of university degrees per capita than any other country.
Buses around Israel have signs that quote the biblical passage, “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old.”
One million notes are left in the Kotel (Western Wall) each year. They are cleaned out twice a year, before Passover and Rosh Hashanah.
Beersheva has the largest number of chess grandmasters per capita of any city in the world.
Israeli bank notes have Braille on them to assist the blind.
Microsoft has more employees in Israel than it does per capita anywhere in the world.
Israel has the highest number of museums per capita in the world.
Israel has more orchestras per capita than any other country.
Israeli academics produce more scientific papers per capita than anywhere else in the world.
Israel has more computers per capita than any other country.
Israel is the only country in the Middle East where the number of Christians is increasing.
Relative to its population, Israel has absorbed more immigrants than any other country, with newcomers from more than 100 countries.
Voicemail technology was developed in Israel.
Life expectancy in Israel is among the highest in the world, at 82 years.
Israel has won more Nobel Prizes than all other Middle East countries combined.
Jerusalem has over 1,500 public parks and gardens.

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Israel at 70 – Mature and Prosperous The ingredients for a bright future. Joseph Puder

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

I am on my way to Israel to celebrate the 70th birthday of the Jewish state. Having experienced many of Israel’s birthdays before, when the country was noticeably less mature or prosperous, this birthday is a special occasion. With all the glory attached to the coming of age, there are also sets of precedents that require caution and good judgment.

The number 70 has meaningful commutations in Jewish tradition. It recalls the 70-year Babylonian Exile that led to the start of the Second Jewish Commonwealth in 530 BCE. The return to the Land of Israel occurred through the Charter given by the Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great, allowing Jews who wished to return to “Jerusalem that is in Judah” and build a “House for the God of Heaven” to do so. Prime Minister Netanyahu, in praising Donald Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, compared him to King Cyrus the Great. Similarly, President Harry Truman was told that in recognizing the Jewish state, he would become another King Cyrus for Jews everywhere.

Zerubbabel, a descendent of King David, led the first wave of returnees to Jerusalem. The second wave come with the Scribe Ezra (book of Ezra in the third portion of the Hebrew Bible called Ketuvim). The third stage of mass return to the land occurred with Nehemiah, a high official in the Persian Empire administration.

The first returnees had to deal with the Samaritans and the Ammonites, in the same way the 19th and 20th century returnees had to deal with the Arabs. The Samaritans, like the Arabs of later times, were brought into the land of Israel by the Assyrian kings at the end of the Eight Century BCE in place of the Israelites they had deported. Arabs settled in the Land of Israel following the deportation of the Jews (most but not all) by the Romans in the aftermath of the Jewish rebellion, which ended in the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

To Fire or Not to Fire Mueller That is the question. Bruce Thornton

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

Robert Mueller, who just sicced a federal prosecutor on Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, is out of control. Like many federal prosecutors, he is puffed up by his own self-righteous arrogance, one fueled by the unaccountable and unrestrained power he’s been given in our supposedly democratic republic. Forget all the “integrity” and “professionalism” encomia from the bipartisan, deep-state mutual back-scratchers. Mueller represents one of the greatest threats to our political order: the abuse of power under cover of law.

But the question is not whether Mueller deserves to be fired and disgraced. He obviously should. The real question is whether Trump should pull the trigger.

Most of the advice from mainstream Republicans is telling the president to back off. The Wall Street Journal summarizes their counsel: “Firing Mr. Mueller wouldn’t stop the investigation, though it would cost him Republican support and probably guarantee his impeachment if Democrats take the House in November.” Instead, ignore Mueller and line up some more achievement to lay before the voters.

Another argument for patience is that numerous investigations are currently underway looking into the conduct of Obama’s FBI and DOJ regarding their handling investigations of Hillary Clinton’s private email server and family foundation. There are also continuing Congressional investigations into these and other matters. Keeping his head down will make Trump less likely to steal any media thunder from the bombshell revelations that may be unearthed by these investigations in the next few months.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

‘Battle Grows Over Gene-Edited Food.’ By Jacob Bunge and Amy Dockser Marcus

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

“Julie Borlaug is the head of public relations for startup Inari Agriculture Inc. and the granddaughter of Norman Borlaug, who pioneered new wheat varieties and large-scale farming methods that revolutionized food production in Mexico and India in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. Dr. Borlaug’s advances have been credited with saving hundreds of millions of people from starvation, and he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970.”

Zachary Lippman, a plant biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, stood among 2 acres of his experimental crops, including some altered with a gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9, one of the most ambitious efforts yet to improve on what nature created.

He plucked a tomato, held it up and asked: “Will people eat it?”

That question is rippling through the food industry, where a battle for public opinion is under way even before the new gene-edited foods hit the market.

Proponents including scientists and agriculture-industry executives say gene editing in plants could transform agriculture and help feed a growing global population. Organic farmers and natural-food companies say it may pose risks to human health and permanently alter the environment by spreading beyond farms.

The agricultural industry is desperate to avoid a repeat of the acrimonious and costly battles it fought over the genetically modified crops currently on the market, even though authorities such as the Food and Drug Administration and World Health Organization have deemed them safe. Seed companies and farm groups have spent millions of dollars on campaigns promoting the benefits of biotech crops, while fighting labeling requirements and proposals to block their cultivation.Although biotech crops have become ubiquitous on U.S. farms, covering more than 90% of corn and soybean acres, consumer mistrust of genetically modified organisms, called GMOs, has grown. A 2016 survey by the Pew Research Center showed 39% of U.S. adults believe foods made from GMO crops are less healthy than conventional versions.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Scandal Rocks Sweden’s Jury for Nobel Prize in Literature Swedish Academy in turmoil over fallout from ties to photographer accused of sexual assault By David Gauthier-Villars

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

STOCKHOLM—The Swedish Academy, the body responsible for awarding the Nobel Prize in Literature, is in crisis over its handling of a sexual-assault scandal.

The academy said late Thursday that two of its members— Sara Danius, its permanent secretary, and poet Katarina Frostenson, whose husband has been accused of sexual assault—had retired, the latest episode in a blame game that has consumed the prestigious institution for months.

The scandal broke in November when Swedish daily newspaper Dagens Nyheter published the testimonies of 18 women accusing a 71-year-old Franco-Swedish photographer, Jean-Claude Arnault, of sexual assault and sexual harassment between 1996 and 2017.

The accusations, which Mr. Arnault denies, have ricocheted onto the institution because the photographer, a prominent figure in Sweden’s cultural life, is married to Ms. Frostenson, and because the academy has provided financial support to some of his cultural projects.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Trump’s Next Syria Challenge A single missile strike won’t stop the designs of Iran and Russia.

Posted By on April 16th, 2018

President Trump announced “mission accomplished” after Friday night’s missile attack on Syria, and he’s right if his goal was merely to punish Bashar Assad’s use of chemical weapons. But if Mr. Trump also wants to deter Russian and Iranian imperialism, reduce the chances of another Mideast war and keep Syria from producing global terrorists, he needs a more ambitious strategy.

Even narrowly defined, the military strike was valuable in enforcing the longtime taboo against chemical weapons—all the more so after Barack Obama drew his famous “red line” in 2013 and failed to enforce it. Criticism of the strike from the Obama gallery that failed so utterly in Syria can’t be taken seriously.

The 105 Tomahawk and standoff air missiles, launched from three directions into Syria, did tangible damage to Syria’s chemical-weapons R&D and storage facilities. Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie told reporters, “no Syrian weapon had any effect on anything we did,” including Russian-supplied missile defenses.

The damage might have a deterrent effect on Assad’s use of chemicals, given that Mr. Trump said Friday he is prepared to enforce the ban again. Mr. Trump lost credibility on that score in the last year after his Administration concluded several times that Assad had used chlorine gas but took no action. Next time the attack should be even more punishing.

The military contribution from Britain and France was useful in demonstrating a larger willingness to prevent the normalization of WMD. And the strike could have a demonstration effect on North Korea as Mr. Trump heads into his perilous summit with Kim Jong Un.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Scott Pruitt, Warrior for Science Democrats and liberal journalists attack the EPA head for insisting on transparency, shared research, and rigorous peer review. John Tierney

Posted By on April 15th, 2018

Imagine if the head of a federal agency announced a new policy for its scientific research: from now on, the agency would no longer allow its studies to be reviewed and challenged by independent scientists, and its researchers would not share the data on which their conclusions were based. The response from scientists and journalists would be outrage. By refusing peer review from outsiders, the agency would be rejecting a fundamental scientific tradition. By not sharing data with other researchers, it would be violating a standard transparency requirement at leading scientific journals. If a Republican official did such a thing, you’d expect to hear denunciations of this latest offensive in the “Republican war on science.”

That’s the accusation being hurled at Scott Pruitt, the Republican who heads the Environmental Protection Agency. But Pruitt hasn’t done anything to discourage peer review. In fact, he’s done the opposite: he has called for the use of more independent experts to review the EPA’s research and has just announced that the agency would rely only on studies for which data are available to be shared. Yet Democratic officials and liberal journalists have denounced these moves as an “attack on science,” and Democrats have cited them (along with accusations of ethical violations) in their campaign to force Pruitt out of his job.

How could “the party of science,” as Democrats like to call themselves, be opposed to transparency and peer review? Because better scientific oversight would make it tougher for the EPA to justify its costly regulations. To environmentalists, rigorous scientific protocols are fine in theory, but not in practice if they interfere with the green political agenda. As usual, the real war on science is the one waged from the left.