Israel was originally conceived of as a secular state. It is instructive to think that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was founded more than twenty years before the state itself. The idea of free, critical inquiry as a core value was announced both by the University and by Israel's declaration of independence.But Ben-Gurion's historical compromise with the Orthodox parties has turned out to be a catastrophe. Israel, to this day, doesn't have a constitution; the Rabbinate is involved in the lives of countless people who don't want anything to do with it, and the Orthodox stream in Judaism (which is a minority in Jewry worldwide) has a monopoly that aggravates and alienates millions of Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.
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For the CIA supervisors and operatives responsible for torture, the chickens are coming home to roost; that is, if President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder mean it when they say no one is above the law – and if they don’t fall victim to brazen intimidation.
Claims that an Afghan immigrant was on the verge of unleashing a terrorist attack on New York City on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 are missing a key element: explosives or the chemicals allegedly used to make them, the man's attorney said.
Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line.
More Americans believe in angels than in evolution—and Richard Dawkins isn't going to take it anymore.
There’s no kill switch for the Internet, no secret on-off button in an Oval Office drawer. Yet when a Senate committee was exploring ways to secure computer networks, a provision to give the president the power to shut down Internet traffic to compromised Web sites in an emergency set off alarms.
An Egyptian man has received a $250,000 payout from the FBI because of the way he was treated following the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.
The phenomenon of "floating storage", which has been brought about by a huge over-supply of global tanker capacity and unusual market conditions, is just one example of the multitude of ways in which a small group of private, mostly Swiss-based companies have become adept at turning vast profits from the closed and often murky world of independent oil trading.
