". . . a republic, if you can keep it."
Spaces in a new car park in the Black Forest town of Triberg now come with male and female symbols. The spaces for women are wider and well lit, while those for men are close to concrete pillars and can only be reversed into.
Explaining the policy, Mayor Gallus Strobel said it was a natural decision because men are better at parking than women. 
(Read more)
In large study halls, ranks of young Jewish men are bent over religious books or debating in pairs the meaning of their texts. Many wear the large knitted kippa associated with the settler movement; a few have guns by their side.
This scene is typical in settlements all over the West Bank, where the hesder yeshiva movement has gained strength in recent decades. The programme, backed by the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF), allows religious Jews to combine intensive theological study with a shortened period of military service over five years.
For these young religious Zionists, serving in the army to defend the state of Israel and the Jewish presence in the occupied West Bank is a crucial element of a theology that has the redemption of the biblical land of the Jews at its centre.
But some critics fear the influence and advancement of these highly motivated soldiers could turn the traditionally secular IDF into an ideological instrument and create conflicts over whether the men’s duty is to obey their rabbi or their commanding officer.
Gabriel Slater, 20, a hesder yeshiva student who will begin army service within weeks, said the programme had helped him to develop strongly held ideological and religious goals. “I have deep beliefs and I’m going to the army to fulfil them,” he said. He expected to face dilemmas – “moments of difficulty” – in the military and planned to consult his rabbi if he felt he was being asked to “cross a boundary”.
The most apparent points of tension recently have concerned army ceremonies in which women soldiers take part in singing. Some rabbis advised religious soldiers to refuse to attend or to walk out, on the basis that women singing in front of men is forbidden under Jewish law.
But there are bigger questions about whether such soldiers will agree to participate in military operations to evacuate Jews from West Bank settlements, a small number of which have this year been declared illegal by Israel’s supreme court. If there is ever a peace deal with the Palestinians requiring a large-scale evacuation of tens of thousands of settlers, the issue could become critical. (Read more)
The Constitution gives Congress the exclusive right to tax Americans at the federal level. Yet Congress continues to give away this most fundamental responsibility to international organizations, the most dangerous of which is the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Most Americans probably would not approve of their tax dollars being used to support an international organization that undermines their fundamental liberties and promotes giving their hard-earned money to other governments, often run by corrupt or dictatorial regimes. This is precisely what the OECD is doing, with the blessing of the majority members of Congress.
The OECD has just released a report bragging about its “progress” in getting countries to engage in automatic sharing of tax information. The report states: “The automatic exchange of information involves the systematic and periodic transmission of ‘bulk’ taxpayer information by the source country to the residence country concerning various categories of income (e.g., dividends, interest, royalties, salaries and pensions).” The Obama administration is actively supporting this effort.
This means that the most vile governments will receive financial account information automatically about individuals from other countries. Assume you are standing up to or protesting some corrupt or authoritarian regime in your own country – there are too many to name – and to protect your family, you have a bank account in the United States, Switzerland or some other nation that offers basic protections of civil liberties. Under automatic information-sharing, the thugs you are opposing will be receiving information about your finances from the U.S. government and other governments, which can put your property and your life at risk. The response from the bureaucrats in the OECD and Obama administration is “we protect confidential information,” as if they had never heard of Wiki-Leaks or the other never-ending hacks of government data. (Read more)