Arkiv-Global View

Faith traditions can be so harsh that they drive away everyone but the self-righteous scolds. Or they can so indulge in therapeutic comfort and manufactured joy that they come to seem like a charlatan’s game.

They can be so otherworldly that they offer no guidance to those living in this one on matters of justice, freedom and how we should live together. Or they are so captive to the here-and-now that it becomes hard to distinguish between a congregation and a party headquarters.

On February 21, 2012, the Russian feminist punk-art collective Pussy Riot staged a 40-second “Punk Prayer” in Moscow’s Russian Orthodox Cathedral, protesting against Vladimir Putin’s regime. The Putin administration arrested five members of the group including Nadezhda (“Nadya”) Tolokonnikova, Maria (“Masha”) Alyokhina and Yekaterina (“Kat”) Samutsevich, tried and sentenced them in short order, provoking worldwide outrage, even accusations of human rights infractions.

The Malaysian authorities now believe that a jetliner missing since Saturday may have radically changed course around the time that it stopped communicating with ground controllers. But there were conflicting accounts of the course change and what may have happened afterward, adding to the air of confusion and disarray surrounding the investigation and search operation.

A few years ago, when I was blogging at Education Week with Deborah Meier, a reader introduced the term FUD. I had never heard of it. It is a marketing technique used in business and politics to harm your competition. The term and its history can be found on Wikipedia. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. The reader said that those who were trying to create a market-based system to replace public education were using FUD to undermine public confidence in public education.

FEW people have heard of the journal Internal Reference of Ideology and Theory. It is published in such secrecy by the Central Party School in Beijing that only several dozen people read it. They just happen to be the most powerful people in China. Nicknamed the “express train”, it is one of a few vehicles trusted to carry ideas directly to the desks of President Xi Jinping and his colleagues on the Politburo.

“Meet Viktor Yanu­kovych, who is running for the presidency of Ukraine.” Vladimir Putin and I were standing in his office at the presidential dacha in late 2004 when Yanu­kovych suddenly appeared from a back room. Putin wanted me to get the point. He’s my man, Ukraine is ours — and don’t forget it.

Like many days, March 3rd saw the delivery of a stern opinion by President Obama. To judge by recent developments in Ukraine, he said, Russia was putting itself “on the wrong side of history.” This might seem a surprising thing for an American president to say. The fate of Soviet Communism taught many people to be wary of invoking History as if it were one’s special friend or teammate.

For a man who is new to the job, the Ukrainian prime minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, is pretty impressive. Indeed, his performance would be stunning by the standards of any long-serving national leader. Responding to the refusal of Russia’s foreign minister to enter into any direct talks with his country, and the less than thrilling response to this obduracy by the western powers, Mr Yatsenyuk’s spontaneous exasperation was pitch perfect: “What’s happened? What’s up with global security? Are we crazy?” It was startling, and deeply shaming.

L’ arcivescovo di Buenos Aires siede in seconda fila sul lato sinistro della Sistina e ha gli occhi fissi davanti a sé, verso i cardinali ai banchi di fronte e più in alto gli affreschi quattrocenteschi con le storie di Cristo, le «Tentazioni» di Botticelli, il Ghirlandaio e la «Vocazione dei primi apostoli», la «Consegna delle chiavi a Pietro» del Perugino, ma è come se il suo sguardo andasse oltre o piuttosto fosse rivolto all’interno, l’aria assorta, «tranquillo e raccolto» lo descrivono, al suo fianco il grande amico francescano Cláudio Hummes gli ha posato un istante la mano sull’avamb

Malaysia Airlines said it was "fearing the worst" on Sunday for a plane carrying 239 people that went missing more than 24 hours ago, as the government said it was investigating four passengers who may have held false identity documents.

There were no reports of bad weather and no sign of why Flight MH370 would have vanished from radar screens off the coast of Vietnam about an hour after it took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing early on Saturday morning.