Last Thursday was Human Rights Day and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, held a hearing to highlight abuses in China, Cuba, Sudan, Vietnam and various other countries. Vietnam, for example, has gone “from bad to worse”: “Hanoi has unleashed a torrent of repression upon courageous citizens fighting for basic rights. … Read more
Last Thursday was Human Rights Day and Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, held a hearing to highlight abuses in China, Cuba, Sudan, Vietnam and various other countries. Vietnam, for example, has gone “from bad to worse”: “Hanoi has unleashed a torrent of repression upon courageous citizens fighting for basic rights. … Read more
Over at the Canadian financial paper, The Financial Post, Diane Francis has a piece on what she sees as “the real inconvenient truth” being ignored at the UN’s Copenhagen conference: The “inconvenient truth” overhanging the UN’s Copenhagen conference is not that the climate is warming or cooling, but that humans are overpopulating the world. A planetary … Read more
It’s 8 a.m. and the dingy apartment building is momentarily unguarded. A woman sweeping her doorway across the street cranes her neck to watch the American walking hurriedly toward the home of her infamous neighbor. I knock, keeping my back to the police camera hidden in the hallway. An elderly man — not the one … Read more
I hit the first-floor landing just as my son’s shoe toppled the crystal angel given me last Christmas by my mother-in-law. I’d heard the “boy noise” escalate from laughter to hysteria to full-on combat. It happens this way with teenage boys; often, it’s a matter of seconds before rough-housing turns into a WWF smack down, … Read more
Anne is still tired from her recent trip to China, but she wants to talk about Barack Obama. The explosive growth of her apostolate, Direction for Our Times, has left her exhausted and half-sick, but she is alarmed about Catholics who are describing Obama as the anti-Christ. She asks me if I have heard those … Read more
As I opened the package that arrived in the mail, a little voice inside my head told me I was nuts. “Have you lost your mind?” it wanted to know. “You can’t have nice things!” The little voice was right, I suppose. If 13 years of parenting have taught me nothing else, they have quite … Read more
The mission of the Global Fund is to fight HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis around the world. Since 2004, this Swiss organization has received over $3 billion, one third of its entire budget, from the United States. A study just released by the Gerard Health Foundation provides evidence that Global Fund grants are supporting abortion providers … Read more
This past November, the United Nations sponsored a meeting in Rio de Janeiro with about 1,700 participants from some 90 countries to consider the future direction of the Internet. The most serious issue they dealt with was supported by a group of nations that included China, Cuba, and Iran: Leaders from these countries are pressing … Read more