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Gulag helped kill Egypt’s only elected leader

When Egypt’s first and only elected president, Mohamed Mursi, dropped dead in a courtroom last week, official Washington barely noticed. President Donald Trump was focused on the crisis in Iran. His administration has made clear that autocratic allies like Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi will not be shamed and cajoled for how they treat their dissidents. Besides, Mursi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, which the Trump administration has considered designating as a terrorist organization. Mursi’s death, however, should be a wake-up call, particularly for ...

Family planning good investment

Malcolm Potts And Alisha Graves Los Angeles Times In the late 1960s, for a brief moment, population growth commanded the kind of political, popular and academic focus that climate change does now. But today, even as the population crisis grows more severe, it has largely fallen off the agenda. Paul Ehrlich’s seminal book on the subject, “The Population Bomb,” was published in 1968, when there were 3.5 billion people in the world and the population was growing by about 2% a year, with about 60 million more births than deaths annually. The United Nations Population ...

Lethal season finally over for horses at track

The grisly winter racing season at Santa Anita finally, mercifully, came to a close Sunday, with 30 horses dead from racing or training. The latest death was just two days ago. And, although racing has closed at the park until late September, training will continue until July 11. A good number of those 30 deaths occurred during training. It’s disconcerting to think that horses will continue even to be trained there. The number of unexplained equine deaths is big enough to justify the spotlight on Santa Anita. However, the disturbing number of deaths at other tracks justifies ...

Do you really want to travel the world that much?

Hypertourism has become the curse of desirable places all over the world. It refers to the swarms of tourists who clog the plazas and narrow streets of prized cultural destinations — Florence, Venice, Barcelona, Prague and others. Party cities, such as Amsterdam, where both prostitution and marijuana are mostly legal, draw especially low-quality tourists. But locals suffering under hypertourism everywhere endure the spectacle of drunken tourists urinating in public. And what about the visitors who are well-behaved and just want to expand their cultural horizons? Are they having ...

Likability: Never underestimate it

Lynne Agress The Baltimore Sun As we near the 2019 Democratic debates, I clearly remember one January 2008 Democratic presidential debate in New Hampshire — the site of the headline making exchange between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. To re-cap, the debate moderator asked Clinton whether she thought she had enough personal appeal to win over voters. But before she could answer, Obama broke in saying, “You’re likable enough.” Evidently, enough voters thought Obama’s comment insensitive, and Clinton won the New Hampshire primary a few days later. Nevertheless, as ...

Chernobyl: Who owns the risks

A recent book “Midnight in Chernobyl” and an HBO miniseries on Chernobyl have brought to light the nuclear power plant disaster that took place 33 years ago. Interestingly, the way the bureaucrats of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dealt with the catastrophic risk is precisely the opposite of how United States bureaucrats deal with it. How each group handles risk is affected by whether or not they “own” the risks. Let me explain. The “socialism” of the USSR refers to the state owning the means of production. In this case, the USSR owned the nuclear power plants ...