See here, from the BBC. It’s all part of a pervasive hardening of North Korean policies on a broad range of subjects, the article says. Desperation will do that.

I do not eat kosher but I learned to cook kosher for friends and family when I was younger. I personally enjoy cooking and eating roast pork, barbequed baby-back ribs, pork sausages, pork chops and even bacon or prosciutto. (I’m not going to prepare a luncheon anytime soon for Temple Beth Israel.) About once a week I’ll eat some form of pig meat. I also eat a variety of other meats during the week but...

Overheard in New York: A five-year-old girl, gets off the train to Grand Central Station, holds her nose and says to mother: “It smells here! It smells like New Jersey! Mommy! It smells like New Jersey!” Now breaking via news outlets throughout the world: Authorities feel something else apparently smells in New Jersey, so today some 30 people that included mayors and even some rabbis have been...

As we approach what hopefully will be a reasonable and humane outcome to the ongoing health care reform debate, some have become very emotional (including this author), some fall back on cold hard facts, cold statistics. For those relying on cold, hard facts to either support their views or oppose others’ views on this issue, a brilliant article in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine is just loaded...

We have all heard about the young, Dutch, Jewish girl, Anne Frank. (She was actually born in Germany, but moved with her family to the Netherlands when she was about five because of the escalating anti-Semitism in Hitler’s Germany) And, of course, the diary she kept for two years while hiding out in de “achterhuis“—hidden rooms in her father’s office building in Amsterdam—has...

Apparently Carter left the church a while ago but it is in the liberal and feminist blogosphere again now because the former president issued a position paper this week again severing all ties: [M]y decision to sever my ties with the Southern Baptist Convention, after six decades, was painful and difficult. It was, however, an unavoidable decision when the convention’s leaders, quoting a few carefully...

The Future of Reading (and its Impact on Jewish Law) by Brian Blum I have seen the future of reading and it is not print books or newspapers. On Wednesday, Amazon unveiled the Kindle DX, a larger version of its popular Kindle eBook reader. The DX’s 9.7-inch screen is two and a half times the size of the original Kindle, making it perfect for reading newspapers, magazines, textbooks, even large format printed...

God. Editor’s note: The wrong link was up earlier. It has been fixed. We regret the error.

Mohammed Ajmal Amir Kasab, 22, a Pakistani terrorist (the only one to be captured alive during the Mumbai’s deadly 26/11 siege last year) today pleaded guilty to 86 charges, including murder and waging war on India, in a Mumbai court. Admitting his role in the carnage which left more than 160 people dead, Kasab said Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi of the banned militant group Lashkar-e-Tayyiba had been involved...

“Secular” India and “Islamic” Pakistan try to suppress prostitution but ignore the plight of thousands of people involved in this highly risky but widely practised profession. Some NGOs have done commendable work, such as a recent drive in Karachi to promote health awareness among sex workers. Lahore, Karachi, Calcutta, Bombay and Lucknow were among the traditional urban centers in undivided...

My cultural intake the past couple of weeks has provided me with a strong dose of polygamy. Courtesy of Netflix, I am about to finish season two of Big Love, the HBO drama about a forward-thinking polygamist family in Utah. On the literary side of the house, I just finished A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, which recounts the story of two Afghan women who find themselves married to the same brutal...

You might remember several months ago the case of the nine-year old Brazilian girl who was raped by her stepfather: Weighing just 79 pounds and barely four feet tall, the 9-year-old girl, from Alagoinha, a town in the northeast, underwent an abortion when she was 15 weeks pregnant at one of the 55 centers authorized to perform the procedure in Brazil. Abortion is legal [t]here only in cases of rape or when the...

On Speaking of Faith this week, TV and Parables of Our Time. Krista Tippet says shows like Lost, The Wire, and Battlestar Galactica are “engaging grand themes of ethics and humanity and helping a new generation tell the story of our time.” Her guest, Diane Winston, a journalist and scholar of media and religion at USC, says we’re in a Golden Age of television: And it’s partly a result...

US defense secretary Robert M. Gates has stated an obvious fact: The troops in Afghanistan “are tired…and the American people are pretty tired.” So, what next (or new)? In an ominous use of the word “unwinnable”, once used by the legendary media person the late Walter Cronkite to turn public opinion against the Vietnam war, defense secretary Gates (photo above) says that “after...

US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s visit to the Taj Hotel in Mumbai on Saturday was more than a symbolic gesture. She interacted with the staff of the Taj, and the adjoining Trident-Oberoi hotel, who survived last year’s 26/11 terrorist attack. Taj’s general manager, who lost his wife and two children in the attack, introduced the staff, and then arranged breakfast for the visiting dignitary....

Anyone who has seen the film The Miracle Worker will remember the scene in the dining room where young Helen Keller (played by Patty Duke) eats her meal by going around the table grabbing food from everyone’s plates. Her parents, who pity her “affliction” as they call it, and at the same time feel intimidated by it, allow her to do this because they don’t know how to treat her like a...

For the oldest of us, the Evening News died yesterday, the “most trusted man in America” who came into our living rooms every weekday night and told us about what was happening beyond our own senses, “And that’s the way it is.” For two tumultuous decades, before 24/7 cable and the Internet, Walter Cronkite was the face of the news, mediating between millions of Americans and the...

People wonder about mothers, human and animal, who walk away from their babies… who refuse and do not nurture their young, who literally walk away, stray out late, leave the child in the bush, in the car, at home alone unable to reach the doorknob and without food… the children cry themselves to sleep, furry or human child, matters not… each needs a mother, her warmth, her regard, her watching...

The Episcopal Church’s Step Forward by Britney Wilkins On Monday, the bishops of the Episcopal Church voted to open the ministry position to gay men and lesbians which seems to almost undermine a previous moratorium which was passed three years earlier. While this resolution does not mandate that all dioceses have to consider gay candidates, it simply allows some diocese to do so. This debate over homosexuality...

The White House is misreading the signals from Iran’s turmoil and may find itself in a box by the September deadline President Barack Obama has set to intensify pressure if Teheran does not offer cooperation. Following the street demonstrations contesting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election, Iranian domestic politics have changed fundamentally and the country has entered a backstage civil conflict among powerful...

One of my co-bloggers, Patrick Edaburn, wrote a piece today titled, “Sotomayor Day One: No Surprises.” In it he says: “The first day of hearings are complete and we didn’t really have any surprises.” That’s almost an understatement—especially on the Republican side of the aisle. As expected, they talked about Sotomayor’s “Latino woman comment;” about empathy...

The experts’ views are diametrically opposed. As far as I can tell, there is no partisan element to this disagreement. In Foreign Affairs [subscription only], Fotini Christia and Michael Semple write: The idea that large groups of armed men bent on killing Americans and other Westerners can be persuaded to change sides may seem fanciful at first. But it is not — at least not in Afghanistan. After...

Let us understand: It was 1988 when an old man who worked his way up to being supreme leader of Islam in Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, issued a fatwa against the British born, ethnic Indian author Salman Rushdie, saying the writer should be murdered, and a bounty offered to the killer. Rushdie had published The Satanic Verses and the Ayotollah RK and his followers held this was an ‘blasphemous’...

Our linkfest taking you to weblogs of varying opinions where diverse writers give you their best takes on issues and events. If You Think Sarah Palin Is Considering Leaving Politics then think again. For more on the “mystery of Sarah Palin” go HERE. Meanwhile, some GOPers don’t want her help in their campaigns. Some suggest she might be trying to build an independent conservative movement. A...

In recent times, there have been clear indications that male of the human species is on a suicidal path. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the macho rule of men? Here I am not talking about the mess created by myopic/desperate men (and not just in Iraq and Afghanistan), but the British scientists’ recent claim that they have created human sperm in the lab. If there’s no need for sperm,...