Globe Trot 05.09

Human rights activist Chen Guangcheng's status in China remains unclear, but former U.S. ambassador to the UN John Bolton writes a clarifying op-ed on how the Obama administration compromised Sino-American relations and Chen's life in first giving him an official escort into the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, then releasing him to a hospital where he remains effectively under police control: "Our halting, confused and so far inconclusive diplomacy has increased China's determination to exploit our perceived weaknesses across the broader relationship."

The tale of the new and improved underwear bomb has a lot of holes in it to date. If the bomb carrier was our own CIA operative but the bomb maker is still at large, why are CIA and FBI agents talking about it? And why are U.S. officials touting the "foiled plot" while also saying it never posed a threat to U.S. security?

Peter Lilley is the only member of the British Parliament to ask for a government impact assessment on global warming during a vote on the Climate Change Act. Actually, the only person in the country to request it. He became one of three MPs to vote against the bill, he said, "not on the basis that the science is still so uncertain, but on the evidence provided to Parliament by the government about the costs and benefits of the Act." The government's own report showed that the cost of reducing climate change over 20 years would be more than £200 billion (US$322 billion) while benefits to UK citizens would be £105 billion (US$169 billion). Still, he said in a recent speech (courtesy of the Cornwall Alliance), he and other opponents find themselves "effectively irrelevant" on the subject: "The extraordinary thing about the UK is that our political media and scientific elites are more committed to the doctrines of climate change alarmism-not the general science." Apparently media elites don't want to listen to the right on this issue because Conservatives are "acting as a dangerous and expensive drag on the developing green economy." So Greens are capitalists after all!

Islamists and secular ideologues in the West aren't the only ones who persecute Christians. Read the latest on Hindu nationalists attacking Christians in India. Elizabeth Kendal of Religious Liberty Monitoring writes, "Hindu militants went to the home of Pastor Ratnababu in Kakinada, East Godavari, Andhra Pradesh. They seized Pastor Ratnababu's son, Madhu, whose mouth they stuffed with cloth before tying his hands and legs, sprinkling chili power in his eyes and stabbing him repeatedly."

He actually wrote a book about this! Speaking of secular ideologues, Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann turns his scholarly eye to the species known as "evangelical Christian" in a New York Times blog post, apparently because "some Democrats are flummoxed by evangelical voters." Read this with a sad smile, as Luhrmann must've missed some American history core classes along the way to becoming an anthropologist-believing, as he seems to, that American evangelicals are some newly discovered dark tribe.