CNN (Continuación)

Over the past few weeks, at least 18 Palestinians and three Israelis have been killed in the occupied Palestinian territories. Although President Barack Obama rightly condemned the tragic killing of the three Israeli teenagers, the Palestinian victims have been largely reduced to faceless, nameless statistics who do not elicit comparable reaction.

The exception is the case of Tariq Abu Khdeir, an American high school sophomore and cousin of 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Khdair, who was abducted by Israelis and then burned to death. Tariq was visiting his relatives in Jerusalem and was captured on video being beaten unconscious by Israeli police. But his beating might only have become public because he is an American.…  Seguir leyendo »

After meeting Monday with six victims of sexual abuse by clergy members, Pope Francis apologized for the crimes committed against them and begged forgiveness "for the sins of omission on the part of church leaders who did not respond adequately to reports of abuse".

Apologies are all well and good, but this one brings to mind two trite but true sayings: "Too little, too late" and "Actions speak louder than words". Unfortunately, Francis has more to do so that future popes won't have to keep saying "I'm sorry" for these crimes and the Catholic Church's cover-up.

This is not to downplay the important symbolism of public apologies from the church's top leader.…  Seguir leyendo »

United States leaders have rightly said that defeating the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and resolving Iraq's deepening civil war will require urgent political change in Baghdad. But the military assistance that Iran and Russia are speeding to Shiite groups in Iraq imperils that change.

It now appears that a majority of Iraq's political parties and Shiite religious authorities blame Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's authoritarian tendencies and exclusion of mainstream Sunni groups for the crisis, and they seek his replacement as the starting point for resolving it.

But just as this political majority has begun to form against him, Iran and Russia have extended al-Maliki material and political support that insulates him from domestic political pressure and may even embolden him to try to stay on.…  Seguir leyendo »

A few days after my little brother received death threats, he and I jumped on top of la Bestia -- the Beast -- the train heading north, to escape El Salvador. The country that financed the armed forces seeking to kill our friends and family would be our destination for safety. And like the millions of people forced into migration, I was compelled to leave my home for the uncertainty and waiting unwelcome of the United States.

I left on my last day of college before graduation and dedicated myself to guaranteeing the safety of my brother, still a teen not much older than the unaccompanied minors currently arriving en masse at the U.S.-Mexico…  Seguir leyendo »

The world heard of the plight of a Sudanese Christian wife and mother who, while eight months pregnant, was arrested and sentenced to public flogging followed by execution. Her crime? An Islamic court in Khartoum found her guilty of apostasy, that is, leaving Islam and converting to Christianity. It's a crime punishable by death, according to some interpretations of Islamic law.

Meriam Yehya Ibrahim Ishag, 27, who is married to an American, was released, rearrested, and then released again. It's still uncertain whether her nerve-wracking ordeal is over yet.

But Meriam's plight is nothing new or isolated. Asia Bibi, a Christian mother of five, has been languishing in prison since 2010, sentenced to death in Pakistan for "blasphemy."…  Seguir leyendo »

The recent ordeal of Meriam Yahia Ibrahim Ishag, a Sudanese mother and wife of an American citizen -- coupled with Iran's continued imprisonment of Saeed Abedini, also an American citizen and a pastor -- should awaken our conscience to one grim and inescapable fact: The persecution of Christians continues.

Charged with leaving Islam to marry a Christian, despite being raised a Christian and remaining one throughout her 27 years, Meriam was sentenced to death last month for apostasy. After an international outcry, she was released, rearrested, and released again, according to the U.S. State Department.

In Sudan and Iran, as well as countries like Saudi Arabia, leaders and movements impose their own extreme interpretations of Islam, while restricting the rights of Christians and other religious minorities.…  Seguir leyendo »

The people who killed three Israeli teenagers have hurt the Israeli people deeply, there's no doubt about that. But they have also harmed Palestinians, and they have hurt the cause of peace.

Anyone who fails to condemn this horrific act -- the murder of students going home from school -- is contributing to the poison that makes peace so difficult in the Mideast. Anyone who hesitates, who equivocates, is helping to prolong the conflict.

For Palestinians and their supporters around the world, if you remain silent about the killing of Israelis, you are adding to the duration and bitterness of this conflict.…  Seguir leyendo »

Kenroy Williams, also known as "Booms," is "Guardian of the Reptiles" in Hellshire, located near the Goat Islands in Jamaica. The region is centered in the Portland Bight Protected Area, an area of ocean and land set apart in 1999 to protect its rich biodiversity of birds, reptiles, plants, trees and marine life.

But now, the Jamaican government is preparing to sell the Goat Islands to the China Harbour Engineering Co. to build a megafreighter seaport and industrial park. China Harbour is part of a conglomerate blacklisted by the World Bank under its Fraud and Corruption Sanctioning Policy.

"They're destroying what should be preserved," says Booms, who has been working to protect exceedingly rare reptiles in the area for seven years, including the critically endangered Jamaican iguana.…  Seguir leyendo »

Many people are outraged about the just-revealed psychological experiment Facebook performed in 2012 on 690,000 unwitting people, altering the mix of positive and negative posts in their feeds. Playing with people's emotions without their consent is a problem. But it would be even worse if we think -- after Facebook posts one of its all-too-common apologies -- that Facebook is done manipulating its users.

No. The experiment was only a more intrusive version of what the company does every time we visit our Facebook page.

Facebook's experiment was a version of so-called "A/B" testing, one of the most widely used and effective techniques large websites use to "provide a better customer experience" -- that is, to sell us more stuff.…  Seguir leyendo »

We can spend the next few years beating ourselves up and debating the proposition that George W. Bush saved Iraq and Barack Obama lost it. Or we can get real and try to sort out what we can do now to protect U.S. interests in a region that's melting down.

Iraq was never the U.S.'s to win. That point -- along with lowered expectations and focused goals -- must be the basis of any new approach to the region.

And here are three reasons.

1. Demography: There are two factors that nations -- even functional ones (and Iraq is not) -- can't alter: What they are -- their demography; and where they are -- their geography.…  Seguir leyendo »

As the terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) continues to capture and control more territory in Iraq and Syria, it is important to realize what is at stake in the region and for the American people.

The challenge that ISIS poses is not just to Iraq's stability but also to U.S. security. ISIS is a terrorist group with their own army and bank account that has a clear and growing ability to conduct terrorist attacks against the Iraqi government, Americans and U.S. interests, and even the U.S. homeland.

ISIS, although loosely affiliated with al Qaeda, is in many respects even more extreme in its methods and its brutality than the terrorists who plotted and carried out 9/11.…  Seguir leyendo »

A century ago this Saturday on a street corner in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip fired the shot that started World War I when he killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand. What do we know about history's greatest teenage troublemaker?

1. His name was Gavrilo, or Gabriel.

Our history teachers taught us that World War I began after a gunman killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

The shooting acted as a trigger, metastasizing from a Balkan street corner into a continental crisis by releasing pent-up tension between rival blocs of Great European Powers: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany on one side and France, Russia and Great Britain on the other.…  Seguir leyendo »

The current chaos in Iraq is tragic in almost every way. In retrospect, it is easy to conclude Iraq was not nearly ready enough to assume control of its own security situation when the United States made the decision to withdraw forces in December 2011. The wisdom of that decision will long be debated, but having made it, the United States is now understandably reluctant to undo it.

Even as the Obama administration sorts through a galaxy of unattractive options, none of which is guaranteed to provide stability, it would be well-advised not to overlook one of the biggest strategic lessons of the Iraqi deterioration.…  Seguir leyendo »

Many observers gazing upon the current bloodshed in the Middle East have wondered aloud if we are seeing the disintegration of the nation-state boundaries established in the region nearly a century ago. But the crises in Iraq and Syria have simply laid bare a phenomenon that has been under way for quite some time.

What's more, this process is now almost certainly irreversible, and will lead to a radically different Middle Eastern map than we have known.

In the heady early days of the Arab Spring, many people imagined that the Arab world might finally be entering a period of greater democratization, one that would inevitably lead -- so the thinking went -- to greater social unity.…  Seguir leyendo »

French soldiers sing the national anthem at the beginning of World War I in August 1914. This "war to end all wars" might seem like ancient history, but it changed the world forever. It transformed the way war was fought, upended cultures and home life and stimulated innovations that affect us today. With more than 30 combatant nations and nearly 70 million men mobilized, World War I profoundly destabilized the international order. Look back at some of the war's key events.

The Brits called it the "Great War." To the Yanks, it was the "World War." No one wanted to think there could be a second. Though World War I, which began 100 years ago next month, devastated lives and landscapes, its effect on language was almost paradoxically positive. It spawned hundreds of new words and popularized scores of old ones. Many of them survive today -- there are "cooties," "camouflage," "scrounge" and "dud," for example -- but many have lost their once-widely recognized associations with the war that was hoped would "end war."

Total war, as the world twice found out in the past century, is a turbulent time.…  Seguir leyendo »

Over a week after ISIS took over Mosul and started advancing toward Baghdad, President Obama has articulated the view of the United States on the situation in Iraq and the actions it will pursue. The plan is sensible. It captures well the complexity of the situation and what must happen for peace to be restored.

It is also unlikely to bring meaningful results, precisely because the conditions for success are unlikely to be met.

The President is facing growing criticism over the deterioration of the situation in Iraq and the emergence of a radical jihadi state in large parts of Iraq and Syria.…  Seguir leyendo »

They want all of us to cringe -- and they have succeeded. The Islamic radicals suddenly barreling across Iraq want to make sure people are horrified at their deeds.

Leaders of the organization that calls itself ISIS, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, have launched a sophisticated propaganda campaign that turns the most basic principles of public relations on their head. No PR executive would advise a client to shout to the world details of his most gruesome acts and the extent of his cruelty, but that is precisely what ISIS is doing, and doing so very deliberately.

The images of mass executions, of men digging their own graves before being shot in the back of the head, are splashed on the world's newspapers, television news and social media.…  Seguir leyendo »

Last week, Iraq's second-largest city of Mosul fell to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS. In a few hours, the city's security forces had dropped their weapons and uniforms and fled. Since then, the militants introduced a political charter in Mosul and marched south, seizing additional towns en route to the capital, Baghdad.

In taking Mosul alone, ISIS gained as much as $425 million in cash, an unspecified quantity of gold bullion, huge amounts of light and heavy weaponry (mostly U.S.-made) and probably hundreds of new recruits from three main detention centers, all which were overrun.

This Iraq-based offensive has been coming for at least two years.…  Seguir leyendo »

ISIS, the brutal insurgent/terrorist group formerly known as al Qaeda in Iraq, has seized much of western and northern Iraq and even threatens towns not far from Baghdad.

From where did ISIS spring? One of George W. Bush's most toxic legacies is the introduction of al Qaeda into Iraq, which is the ISIS mother ship.

If this wasn't so tragic it would be supremely ironic, because before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, top Bush officials were insisting that there was an al Qaeda-Iraq axis of evil. Their claims that Saddam Hussein's men were training members of al Qaeda how to make weapons of mass destruction seemed to be one of the most compelling rationales for the impending war.…  Seguir leyendo »

World War I began a hundred years ago this summer, but for many of us it might as well be a thousand. We know it, if we know it at all, as a dimly remembered chapter in high school history, or as scenes from old black-and-white movies of soldiers hunkered in trenches doing battle with Germans in pointy helmets. It was all too real for more than 65 million men from some 30 nations who were plunged into carnage the likes of which the world had never before seen.

Every one of those soldiers is dead, and the causes they fought for are lost on many of us.…  Seguir leyendo »