Columnist.
Last week a middle-aged businessman rescued five students from a lynch mob. Now the lynch mob is after the businessman, threatening to kill him for his act of bravery. "I'm not a hero," insists the man, as heroes usually do. "I did it because I'm a human being." The incident happened in Hebron, the ancient city in Israel's West Bank that today is largely controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Five yeshiva students, haredi ("ultra-Orthodox") tourists from America, took a wrong turn while driving to the Cave of Machpela, the sacred burial site of the Biblical patriarchs, and suddenly found themselves under attack in one of Hebron's Arab neighborhoods.
What made Harold Hodge Jr. believe he was entitled to peacefully stand with a protest sign on the outdoor plaza of the US Supreme Court? A 1949 federal statute makes it illegal to assemble or demonstrate on the Supreme Court grounds, or to display there any "flag, banner, or device" expressing a public message. Hodge, a Maryland college student, violated that law four years ago by standing in front of the court building wearing a placard around his neck that read: "The U.S. Gov. Allows Police To Illegally Murder And Brutalize African Americans and Hispanic People." Hodge was ordered three times to leave the plaza and then arrested, but he claims he had a First Amendment right to be there with his sign.
The Arnold Arboretum in Jamaica Plain is more than a renowned horticultural jewel; it is also a splendid venue for cyclists, with miles of meandering paths and gorgeous views of Boston. The Charles River Esplanade is another bikers' oasis, part of an 18-mile loop along the river that separates Boston from Cambridge. For commuters, the Southwest Corridor Park that stretches from Back Bay to Forest Hills is a marvel of urban design that offers terrific biking in the heart of the city. If you want to ride a bicycle in Boston, you've got plenty of great places to do it.
The fourth circle of Hell, as envisioned by Dante Alighieri in *The Divine Comedy*, is reserved for the avaricious and the profligate. It is where those whose lust for getting and spending knew no bounds in life are punished in the afterlife by being battered endlessly with heavy weights. Notable among the souls damned for their greed, Dante wrote, "were clergymen and popes and cardinals, within whom avarice works its excess." What disgusted the great poet in 14th-century Florence — money-grubbing hucksters masquerading as men of God — is just as disgusting in 21st-century America.
Supporters of Donald Trump relish the prospect of a president who knows how to "get things done," and won't bore them with details or principles. They like hearing Trump tout the stop-at-nothing aggressiveness of his business dealings, as in this description, in a CNN interview, of how he acquired the Doral golf resort in Miami: "I didn't sit down and say 'let's do a 14-point plan.' I went in and got it. I took it away from so many people." Trump boasted of his prowess at a rally in Michigan on Aug. 11. "You have to be able to do certain things" if you want to be successful, he crowed. I "beat the hell out of people.... I know how to get things."
Starting this fall, "Sesame Street" will be brought to its millions of viewers by the letters H, B, and O. After 45 years as a jewel in the crown of public broadcasting, the iconic children's television program is moving to the cable network better known for such decidedly adult fare as "Game of Thrones" and "True Detective." The five-year deal, announced last week by Sesame Workshop and HBO, is a good-news story from every angle: good for the show's fans, good for the nonprofit that creates it, and good for anyone who never before noticed that there was always an obvious and reassuring response to the public-television slogan: "If PBS doesn't do it, who will?"
In *Rendezvous with Destiny*, his superb chronicle of Ronald Reagan's 1980 presidential campaign, Craig Shirley quotes a "remarkably candid" assessment that appeared in The Washington Post eight months before the election. It was written by reporter Lou Cannon, who had covered Reagan's political career from the outset and seen the candidate from every angle, at his best and his worst. Reagan had gotten plenty of disparaging press coverage, Cannon acknowledged — some of it under Cannon's own byline. Yet the California governor had never treated him or any other detractor with hostility or rudeness.
Bobby Jindal's presidential quest may not take him all the way to the White House. But if his time on the campaign trail helps put assimilation back at the heart of the nation's immigration debate, he will have rendered his country a valuable service. The 44-year-old governor of Louisiana was born and raised in Baton Rouge. His parents had immigrated to the United States from Punjab in northern India, and Jindal's election in 2007 made him the first Indian American chief executive of any state in US history.
Japan's less-than-wholehearted remorse for its World War II-era atrocities has long been an unhealed wound in its relations with its neighbors. The bruise is throbbing anew with the approach of August 15, the 70th anniversary of the announcement of Japan's surrender. China's ambassador to Tokyo revived the topic on July 23, when he pointedly advised Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe — who plans to deliver a speech marking the anniversary — to convey genuine contrition for the suffering caused by Japan's aggression. "We will be watching how Japan sums up its past and shows sincerity to the victimized countries," said the ambassador. Abe and other Japanese leaders have acknowledged their country's crimes during the war, but their apologies have tended to be grudging or awkward. Frequently they have been undermined by truculent rationalizations, or by suggestions that Japan's ugliest wartime offenses might still be open to debate.
As a US senator and a candidate for president a decade ago, John Kerry couldn't bring himself to worry overmuch about Islamic terrorism. Today, as a secretary of state trying to sell a nuclear accord that would lift economic sanctions from the world's leading state sponsor of Islamic terrorism, he still can't. During his run for the White House in 2004, Kerry insisted that the danger from global jihadists should be viewed as primarily an "intelligence gathering, law enforcement, public diplomacy effort," not a military conflict. "We have to get back to the place we were," he told an interviewer — back to regarding suicide bombings and planes flying into skyscrapers as a manageable annoyance, not an existential threat. He likened terror attacks to prostitution and illegal gambling: "a nuisance" that "we're never going to end ... but we're going to reduce."
Moments after it was announced that the United States and its allies had reached a nuclear deal with Iran, the drums began beating for a Nobel Peace Prize. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, tweeted happily: "I think the work of the Nobel Committee ... this year just got much easier."
An argument regularly advanced by opponents of the death penalty is that incapacitation doesn't require execution. Life imprisonment without parole is sufficient, they say: Put the most dangerous murderers behind bars and keep them there forever. But "lock 'em up and throw away the key" is a delusion. Life without parole is no replacement for the death penalty when it comes to protecting innocent lives. Understandably, many find it reassuring to believe that there is a way to protect the public from the worst killers without requiring the state to kill. National surveys find a preference for locking up murderers for life. In the most recent, a Quinnipiac University poll released in June, 48 percent of respondents said a person convicted of murder should be sentenced to life without parole; only 43 percent preferred death. But the last few weeks have provided vivid reminders that life sentences and high-security cells are no guarantee that deadly criminals have been removed from society for good.
On July 1, President Obama announced the formal resumption of diplomatic relations with Cuba, asserting confidently that "American engagement ... is the best way to advance our interests and support for democracy and human rights." On July 5, the Communist regime in Havana delivered its customary response. It arrested more than 80 democratic dissidents, including at least 60 members of Ladies in White, a peaceful group of brave women who march weekly in support of husbands, fathers, and other relatives imprisoned in the Castros' jails. Many of those detained were hurt, some severely. One prominent human-rights activist, Antonio Rodiles, was sent to the hospital with a shattered nose; he had reportedly been handcuffed by security forces, then beaten for shouting "Long live freedom" and "Long live human rights." There had been even more arrests and beatings in the days leading up to Obama's Rose Garden statement. Some 225 Cuban dissidents across the island were arrested the previous Sunday, with Ladies in White again prominent among those targeted. In fact, there have been police actions against Cuban democrats for 12 Sundays in a row — the government makes a point of going after dissidents as they walk to Mass or emerge from church holding photos of imprisoned loved ones.
It is *the* classic American history painting, instantly familiar to millions as the image of that fateful moment in 1776 when history turned on its hinge, and a nation conceived in liberty was born. For nearly two centuries, it has hung in the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington, an icon of the American founding by an artist who lived through the Revolution and personally met most of the men depicted in his painting. And yet John Trumbull's *Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776* captures a scene that never occurred. In the famous picture, the five men appointed to prepare a declaration of independence from Great Britain — John Adams of Massachusetts, Roger Sherman of Connecticut, Robert Livingston of New York, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, and Benjamin Franklin of Pennsylvania — are shown presenting their draft to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. But it was actually on June 28 that the committee's original draft was reported to the Congress (and only Jefferson, who chaired the drafting committee, would have submitted the document to the presiding officer). The vote in favor of independence came on July 2, after which Congress spent the better part of three days debating and amending the declaration's words. On the morning of July 4, the delegates agreed to a final text and sent it off to be printed.
During his Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2005, then-Judge John Roberts emphasized his strong belief in judicial modesty. "Judges are like umpires," Roberts famously said. "Umpires don't make the rules; they apply them." If confirmed as chief justice, he promised, "I will remember that it's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." But it was no impartial umpire who authored last week's 6-3 opinion in King v. Burwell, the Obamacare subsidy case. Far from applying the rules as enacted in the Affordable Care Act, the chief justice discounted those rules as the product of "inartful drafting," passed by Congress without sufficient "care and deliberation." The lawmakers' substandard work product, he argued, freed the Supreme Court to disregard the statute's plain language, construing it to mean the opposite of what it says.
During a visit to Estonia on Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ash Carter made it official: The United States is sending a combat brigade's worth of tanks, armored vehicles, and other military equipment to six NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe. For the first time since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Washington will station heavy weaponry on territory that was once under Moscow's boot. Along with plans for a new NATO rapid-response force, as well as a series of large-scale military exercises this month, the pre-positioning of equipment in the former Soviet satellites is part of what is being called "the biggest reinforcement of NATO forces since the end of the Cold War." To judge from the news coverage, you could be forgiven for thinking America and its allies were revving up for war with Russia.
Pope Francis had harsh words for the arms industry on Sunday, condemning as "two-faced" those who claim to be Christian while manufacturing weapons or investing in companies that produce them. "It is hypocritical to talk about peace and make weapons," the pope told an audience of young people in Turin. "Doing one thing and saying another. What hypocrisy!" It's not the first time Francis has blasted the defense industry. In May, he denounced the arms business as an "industry of death," run by people who "don't want peace" because "they make more money from war." In February, he labeled weapons dealers "merchants of death" and blamed them for "furthering a cycle of hate, fratricide, and violence."
It speaks well of Republicans that most of them have no use for Donald Trump. The real-estate mogul and reality-TV personality proclaimed himself a presidential candidate on Tuesday, with a bizarre and rambling announcement in the lobby of the Trump Tower in Manhattan that drove the needle on the crazy-meter way into the red zone. I used to think that Trump was about as plausible a GOP candidate as Rufus T. Firefly. I realize now that I owe Firefly an apology. Heading into last week's event, Trump had already established himself as the GOP's most unpopular candidate — the first candidate in modern presidential primary history, as political analyst Harry Enten remarked, to begin a White House run with a majority of his own party against him. Averaging together the three most recent national polls, Enten calculates that a staggering 57 percent of Republicans have an unfavorable view of Trump. In a Fox News survey this month, 59 percent of likely Republican voters said Trump was a candidate they would "never vote for."
I was a four-year-old in kindergarten the first time I remember reading in a library. The book was *Are You My Mother?* by P.D. Eastman, and I'm not sure which I found more captivating — the adventure of the hatchling that sets off to find its mother, or my own adventure of picking out a book from what seemed an endless array of enticing titles. I was hooked early, on books and libraries both. To this day I can visualize precisely the shelves in the fiction section of my school's library, where I first discovered many of my favorite children's novels: *The Twenty-One Balloons, Harriet the Spy, A Wrinkle in Time*. But the small library in my Cleveland-area day school was merely a gateway drug to the local public library a mile from my home. I spent innumerable hours there as a boy, addicted as much to the serendipitous pleasures of searching for a good book as to the satisfying relish of losing myself in its pages once I found one. My parents, raising five kids on a meager income, had little money to spare for buying books. But my library card was free, and I made heavy use of it.
