Peace, Justice and the Ultimate Crime

The case of Noura Hussein has brought the controversial subject of forced and child marriages to the forefront once again on the world stage. Noura is a Sudanese youth, now nineteen, who was given away in marriage by her family when she was only 15. Shortly after the marriage took place—against the teen’s will—Noura escaped but eventually, after a three-year hiatus, was returned to the custody of her legal husband by the hand of her own father. Once locked up again in her husband’s home, Noura continued to refuse the physical advances of her imposed spouse. In order to consummate the marriage, according to the young woman’s defense, members of the husband’s family held Noura down while he raped her. When he tried to rape her again on his own the next day, Noura stabbed him to death. Seeking help, Noura returned to her own home, but her family turned her in to the authorities. Sudan is one of a large number of countries in the world where marital rape is not considered a cr...

Breaking deals The US president’s unilateral decision this past month to abandon the Iran nuclear accord has suddenly made the world a much more dangerous place. President Donald Trump’s contention that this will somehow help keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons is counter-intuitive, since the whole purpose of the nuclear agreement—reached under the former administration of Barack Obama after two years of arduous negotiations among seven nations—was to put a stay on Iran’s nuclear ambitions and place it on the path to peaceful nuclear development, while avoiding a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, led by Iran’s three major rival powers there, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Iraq. The timing for the Iran nuclear deal offered the added advantage of providing a diplomatic space in which Iran could be gradually integrated back into the world concert of nations, after long years of isolation and hardship imposed by major Western nations led by the United States. The attendant ...

We are ever more dependent on the advanced technology that we, in contemporary society, use on a daily basis. Much of it has, in fact, lost the mystique and novelty that it held for us just a decade or so ago. What before were amazing newfangled gadgets have quickly become everyday tools that we use automatically and with little thought as to the marvel that they represent compared to what was available for our daily use just a few decades ago, and the latest advances are happening at a rate many hundreds of times faster than ever before, especially in the fields of communications and transportation. But powering the technical advance, there remains the primitive truth of the natural elements necessary to create it. While some of us may be mildly concerned about what will happen to all of the hardware of the modern technological age once it becomes obsolete, few of us give a lot of thought to where the elements used in the manufacturing of that hardware come from in the first pla...

Although many Western observers are already showing optimism over the semi-retirement of Raúl Castro and the rise to office of the previously obscure Miguel Díaz Canel, what just happened in Cuba is not a regime change. In fact, for the moment, it appears that very little will change in that island nation, including the severe restriction of human and civil rights with which Cubans have been living for the past six decades. Miguel Díaz Canel While it is true that Díaz Canel is the first person other than Fidel and Raúl Castro in nearly 60 years to ostensibly take charge of the country, he was handpicked by Raúl to ensure the continuation of a Castro dynasty that has been ensconced in power since the end of the Cuban Revolution in 1959. He has garnered Castro's favor by eschewing personal power quests and adhering to the regime’s main political and economic lines in his most recent post as the country’s First Vice-President, after long years as a grassroots regime champion...

The announcement this past week that US President Donald Trump would freeze an already paltry 200 million dollars in additional aid funds that were to be used for recovery efforts in Syria would appear to make clear his administration’s complete lack of empathy for the people of that war-ravaged country. The additional funding had been announced during a Middle East diplomatic trip in February by former US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom Trump would unceremoniously sack via Twitter shortly afterward. Trump last week told a crowd of his supporters that the US would be leaving Syria “like, very soon” and said that it would be other countries’ job “to take care of it” from now on. This was not inconsistent with Trump’s stance on Syria prior to his election at the end of 2016, when he said that he thought a good solution would be to let Russia handle it. There can be little doubt that Russia is “handling it” by materially and militarily aiding and abetting the Syrian regime in...

It would be fair to say that the life of Stephen Hawking was a constant, monumental and all-consuming challenge. And with that challenge came an enormous sense of urgency. It would be hard to find a more curious and scientifically probing mind than that of Hawking, and his desire to meet and surpass the challenges he set out for himself was overshadowed by a sword of Damocles that hung by a hair above his head throughout his entire life. At age twenty-one, doctors “gave” him three years to live. From then on, and for the next half-century, he took the years he desired, in spite of that death sentence, and made every one count in terms of his discoveries and of his gifts of knowledge to the world at large. By the time Hawking died this past week at the age of seventy-six, he was, literally, about as close as any human could get to being an immensely active brain housed in what had become an almost entirely inert package. But despite his nearly complete physical disability, h...