What does the Bible say about who you can't have sex with?

By Dennis Edwards:

I was reading through Leviticus chapter 18 this morning and came across quite a discovery. The book of Leviticus contains many of the Laws of Moses. Chapter 18 is specifically about sexual prohibitions, or in other words, who you are not supposed to have sexual relations with. Generally, these laws follow the law of not having sexual relations with those who are near kin.

The list goes like this: You should not have sexual relations with your father, your mother, your father’s wife if she is not your mother, your sister- the daughter of your father, nor the daughter of your mother, your granddaughter, your father’s wife’s daughter, your father’s sister- your aunt, your mother’s sister- your aunt, your father’s brother’s wife, your daughter-in-law, your brother’s wife, a woman and her daughter nor her daughter’s daughter, nor the woman’s sister, nor when a woman is having her menstrual period, nor with thy neighbour’s wife.[1] That’s quite a list.

After this long list of who you shouldn’t have sex with, God interjects that He prohibits letting thy children be passed through the fire to Molech.[2] This practice, comparable to our modern day birth control, was an ancient form of devil worship with the sacrificing of one’s son or daughter to the god Molech in order to obtain spiritual and material blessings. A blood sacrifice to the gods. Does God see modern day abortion in the same light? 

In the Psalms we read: "Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with thee, which frame mischief by a law?"[3] In other words, government officials make it legal to do evil. The Psalm continues, "They gather themselves together against the soul of the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood."[4] What soul could be more righteous and innocent than that of an unborn child? Earlier in the Psalm we read, "Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the wicked triumph?"[5] "They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the fatherless. Yet they say, The Lord shall not see, neither shall the God of Jacob regard it."[6] Aren't the children that are aborted in the abortion clinics truly fatherless? The psalmist finishes his song with the promise that God will bring upon the head of the wicked their own iniquity and will cut them off.[7]

After the prohibition of Molech, we find the Word of the Lord concerning homosexual relations. God says, you shall not lie with mankind as you do with womankind.[8] He even calls the practice “an abomination.” The first time he has used the word in the chapter. Even though a Supreme Court or a government may make homosexuality legal and their marriages, God has a higher court and sees things differently. His next condemnation is on having sexual relations with animals, which He calls “confusion.”[9] The next time you see a music performance where the singers are going through the motions of having sexual relations with animals, remember God’s Word. God concludes with these words:

Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: and the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomits out her inhabitants! Ye shall therefore keep my statues and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your nation, nor any stranger that sojourns among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) that the land spue not you out also when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein.[10]

The Bible is pretty strong stuff. God has been very patient with the world, but His patience will not go on forever. The time will come when His must intercede or as He has said in His Word, no flesh would live. In other words, mankind would destroy itself.[11] Have you accepted Christ into your life and rejected the ways of the unbelieving world? Don’t hesitate any longer. Take Jesus today. It's later than you think. Remember, He’s just a prayer away!

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[1] Leviticus 18:6-20

[2] Leviticus 18:21

[3] Psalm 94:20

[4] Psalm 94:21

[5] Psalm 94:3

[6] Psalm 94:6-7

[7] Psalm 94:20

[8] Leviticus 18:22

[9] Leviticus 18:23

[10] Leviticus 18:24-30

[11] Matthew 24:21-22

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UK Mennonites end Sunday services after numbers dwindle

Harriet Sherwood, The Guardian, 16 March 2016:

One of the UK’s smallest religious movements will hold its last act of collective worship this weekend as age, mortality and changing attitudes to faith have forced it to abandon regular services.

The Mennonites–part of the Anabaptist tradition dating back to the 16th century–are closely related to the Amish, who are noted for their plain dress, simple life and rejection of modernity and technology.

But the Mennonites have a wider range of customs and practices, according to Ed Sirett, who was an elder of the church, based in Wood Green, north London, until last year. “On the spectrum, there are some that are very like the Amish to those that are really modern and urban,” he said.

The numbers attending Sunday services have dwindled to single figures from a peak of 40 in the 1990s, said Sirett. “In the last five years, there have been some untimely deaths of highly committed individuals, which has been a huge blow. We’re older and less energetic, and it got to the point when just keeping the rota of Sunday worship going was taking most of the energy of the last half a dozen people. We could probably do more to advance our cause if we weren’t expending so much effort on something which people weren’t coming to.”

Another factor in the church’s decline was changing attitudes towards religion in society generally. In the 2011 census, about a quarter of the UK population reported that they had no religion, up more than 10 percentage points since the previous census in 2001.

“As with many Christian churches, we failed to convince the next generation that following Jesus was the best way. We lost the next generation,” said Sirett.

The London Mennonite Centre closed in 2010, and the church has struggled to fill the positions of elders. Members decided at the end of last year that “we could no longer sustain our usual pattern of community life, despite a perceived obligation to maintain the UK’s only fully functioning, English-speaking Mennonite church,” said a statement from the last remaining elder, Sean Gardiner.

Sirett said the decision to end services was “a very sad moment. The pain is not a super-shock, but it’s still like a bereavement.”

Mennonites, along with all Anabaptists, are baptised or re-baptised as adults. “We are a believers’ church, a church of choice, not a default church,” said Sirett. They are committed pacifists and strong believers in justice, mutual aid and community.

Anabaptist churches were largely driven out of England during the reign of Elizabeth I, only returning in the middle of the last century. There are about 2.1 million Anabaptists globally, concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and North America. Only about 3% live in Europe.

Following the north London group’s final service on Sunday, members may attempt to establish a virtual community and will continue to meet and socialise individually.

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How To Be A Better Friend, Even When You’re Busy

By Laura Vanderkam, Fast Company, March 17, 2016:

Get Elisabeth McKetta and Cathy Doggett on the phone together and they can’t stop laughing. Soon they are finishing each other’s sentences about events that happened a decade ago. They met as young roommates and have stayed close, despite busy work schedules, growing families, and the distance: McKetta lives in Boise, Idaho, and Doggett in Austin, Texas. “I talk with Elisabeth more than probably anyone who lives in our town,” says Doggett. Their weekly phone conversations cover goals and notes from their two-person book club.

The relationship hasn’t always been perfect. There was that time McKetta didn’t return three phone calls in a row, and the time she and her husband accidentally rented their house out on Airbnb when Doggett was scheduled to visit (“Cathy has been a great role model to me on how not to be flaky,” says McKetta). But neither can imagine life without the other. Their friendship “enriches my whole life. It helps me see the whole world in a broader way,” says Doggett.

It’s the kind of friendship many people would love to have. The problem is that during the busy years of building careers and raising families, “setting aside time for friends can feel self-indulgent or even selfish,” says Irene S. Levine, PhD, psychologist and professor of psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine and producer of The Friendship Blog. But “a number of studies have shown that friends are vital to our physical health and emotional well-being,” Levine says. “They provide concrete and intangible support to make these busy years easier and more enjoyable.”

Here are ways to be a good friend, even when you’ve got a lot going on.

GO BIG. Paradoxically, big get-togethers can be easier to prioritize than smaller ones. Jane Theriault, an assistant professor of psychology who lives outside of Boston, gets together with her former sorority sisters annually. They block the time off a year in advance. “The weekend is treated like a huge priority, like a wedding, and we rotate the location based on people’s needs,” she says. Now husbands and boyfriends and kids come too. Involving the family reduces the guilt factor, and when significant others become friends, this tightens ties. If you’ve got a friend group you’d like to cultivate, become the instigator of such a trip. Eventually it will take on a life of its own.

GET IT ON THE CALENDAR, AGAIN AND AGAIN. One-off events take a lot of effort to plan. Recurring ones don’t. Sarah Baldwin, a university administrator who lives in Kentucky, started a book club in order to see friends more regularly. “I am religious about that meeting,” she says. “Sometimes I don’t get to read the book, but I always go. It’s my once-a-month 7:30 to 10:30 social connection. It’s always good conversation and I always leave a stronger person.”

Susan Murray, who lives in Toronto, instituted a weekly coffee date with her best friend while she was finishing her dissertation and starting new work. “We are both busy in different ways, but this time is critical. It gives us permission to stop, breathe, and reflect,” she says. “Our husbands often say, ‘But weren’t you just out for coffee last week?’” That is, of course, the point–making it regular makes it happen.

USE THE PHONE (PART 1). Not everyone likes talking on the phone, and scheduling phone calls can be tough. Kelsey Wharton, a writer, says that “with young kids, the evening is never a good time to talk,” thanks to dinner, bedtime, and exhaustion. “But my work lunch break is, or a weekend if I know to expect it.” Structuring these phone calls can be helpful, too. Wharton and her best friend consider their conversations “professional development calls” as they share career advice.

Baldwin likewise says, “I often use my time at work, when I have child care, to schedule a 90-minute conversation once a month with one of my ‘soul’ friends.” She works plenty of nights and weekends, so the time all evens out.

USE THE PHONE (PART 2). Even if you can’t talk, you can text. A simple “I’m thinking of you” is a much nicer way to pass the time in the Starbucks line than looking at email (again).

A number of friend groups I interviewed also suggested group texting as a way to stay in touch. Theriault’s friends use it constantly. “It works way better than email because it’s instant–easy to see and respond.”

PRACTICE RANDOM ACTS OF KINDNESS. If you’ve got a few minutes, “a handwritten card, a loaf of banana bread, or a treat bought from a local bakery is a nice way to say, ‘Thinking of you,’ and it doesn’t take a lot of time,” says Wharton. Everyone loves gifts, especially if they’re given just because.

USE SOCIAL MEDIA. Facebook can’t replace real human contact. Says Levine, “Friendships require face time and can’t totally rely on electronic communications. Technology is additive, not a substitute.”

But if you do treat it as an additive, social media tools can keep friendships going in between visits. Deborah Ring, a Rhode Island-based proofreader, has remained close with five girlfriends from college for over two decades. Spread all over the country, “We rarely get to spend time together in person,” she says. But “over the last few years we have used Facebook Messenger to keep in almost daily contact.” They use it to support each other and stay close. For instance, “One of the ladies took part in the Arnold Weightlifting competition in Columbus, Ohio, this weekend. Another one of our group traveled with her and sent us videos of her lifts in real time. It was almost like being there to cheer her on in person.”

DOUBLE-UP. Helena Weiss-Duman, who works at UC Berkeley, gets together with a group of friends in the San Francisco area for dinner once a month. In between, she always aims to “hit a double or a triple,” she says. That means multitasking in a nice way: “You have to do this thing, invite a friend along.” If she’s running an errand, or trying an exercise class, she tries not to go solo.

Baldwin notes that she has to eat anyway, so “I almost always have lunch with someone.” That’s straightforward with work friends, but she will sometimes invite other friends with more during-the-day flexibility to join her at the university cafeteria.

BE CHOOSY. Not all relationships can last through the busy years, and not all should. But keep in mind that we’re often biased towards meeting new people, when we might gain just as much value (or more) from investing time in existing friendships. Wharton, who has two young children, says, “I love to meet new people, but I have to really balance my interest in starting a new relationship with someone versus maintaining current relationships. Should I really ask someone to coffee if I’m already stressed about when I’d find the time?” Friendships should energize you, so when time is tight, it’s best to invest your time and energy in the relationships you know already enrich your life.

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Obama and the House of Saud: a New Skepticism?

By Patrick Cockburn, Counterpunch, March 17, 2016:

Commentators have missed the significance of President Barack Obama’s acerbic criticism of Saudi Arabia and Sunni states long allied to the US for fomenting sectarian hatred and seeking to lure the US into fighting regional wars on their behalf. In a series of lengthy interviews with Jeffrey Goldberg published in The Atlantic magazine, Mr Obama explains why it is not in the US’s interests to continue the tradition of the US foreign policy establishment, whose views he privately disdains, by giving automatic support to the Saudis and their allies.

Obama’s arguments are important because they are not off-the-cuff remarks, but are detailed, wide ranging, carefully considered and leading to new departures in US policy. The crucial turning point came on 30 August 2013 when he refused to launch air strikes in Syria. This would, in effect, have started military action by the US to force regime change in Damascus, a course of action proposed by much of the Obama cabinet as well by US foreign policy specialists.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf monarchies were briefly convinced that they would get their wish and the US was going to do their work for them by overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad. They claimed this would be easy to do, though it would have happened only if there had been a full-scale American intervention and it would have produced a power vacuum that would have been filled by fundamentalist Islamic movements as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Mr Goldberg says that by refusing to bomb Syria, Obama “broke with what he calls, derisively, ‘the Washington Playbook’. This was his liberation day”.

The US has been notoriously averse since 9/11 to put any blame on the Saudis for creating salafi-jihadism, at the core of which is Sunni sectarian hatred for the Shia and other variants of Islam in addition to repressive social mores, including the reduction of women to servile status.

President Obama is highly informed about the origins of al-Qa’ida and Islamic State, describing how Islam in Indonesia, where he spent part of his childhood, had become more intolerant and exclusive. Asked why this had occurred, Mr Obama is quoted as replying: “The Saudis and other Gulf Arabs have funnelled money, and large numbers of imams and teachers, into the country. In the 1990s, the Saudis heavily funded Wahhabist madrassas, seminaries that teach the fundamentalist version of Islam favoured by the Saudi ruling family.” The same shift towards the “Wahhabisation” of mainstream Sunni Islam is affecting the great majority of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world who are Sunnis.

Arab oil states spread their power by many means in addition to religious proselytism, including the simple purchase of people and institutions which they see as influential. Academic institutions of previously high repute in Washington have shown themselves to be as shamelessly greedy for subsidies from the Gulf and elsewhere as predatory warlords and corrupt leaders in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and beyond.

Mr Goldberg, who has had extraordinary access to Obama and his staff over an extended period, reports: “A widely held sentiment inside the White House is that many of the most prominent foreign-policy think tanks in Washington are doing the bidding of their Arab and pro-Israel funders. I’ve heard one administration official refer to Massachusetts Avenue, the home of many of these think tanks, as ‘Arab-occupied territory’.” Television and newspapers happily quote supposed experts from such think tanks as if they were non-partisan academics of unblemished objectivity.

It will be important to know after the US election if the new president will continue to rebalance US foreign policy away from reliance on Sunni powers seeking to use American military and political “muscle” in their own interests. Past US leaders have closed their eyes to this with disastrous consequences in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Mr Goldberg says that President Obama “questioned, often harshly, the role that America’s Sunni Arab allies play in fomenting anti-American terrorism. He is clearly irritated that foreign policy orthodoxy compels him to treat Saudi Arabia as an ally”.

What is truly strange about the new departures in US foreign policy is that they have taken so long to occur. Within days of 9/11, it was known that 15 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden and the donors who financed the operation. Moreover, the US went on treating Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan and the Gulf monarchies as if they were great powers, when all the evidence was that their real strength and loyalty to the West were limited.

Though it was obvious that the US would be unable to defeat the Taliban so long as it was supported and given sanctuary by Pakistan, the Americans never confronted Pakistan on the issue. According to Goldberg, Obama “privately questions why Pakistan, which he believes is a disastrously dysfunctional country, should be considered an ally of the US at all”. As regards Turkey, the US President had hopes of its President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, but has since come to see him as an authoritarian ruler whose policies have failed.

A striking feature of Obama’s foreign policy is that he learns from failures and mistakes. This is in sharp contrast to Britain where David Cameron still claims he did the right thing by supporting the armed opposition that replaced Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, while George Osborne laments Parliament’s refusal to vote for the bombing of Syria in 2013.

Not surprisingly, Obama sounds almost contemptuous of Cameron and the then French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who played a leading role in demanding the Nato air campaign in Libya. The US went along with President Sarkozy’s bragging as the price of French support, though Mr Obama says that “we [the US] had wiped out all the air defences and essentially set up the entire infrastructure” for the intervention. Despite all the US efforts not to make the same mistakes it made in Iraq in 2003, Obama concedes that “Libya is a mess” and privately calls it a “s–t show”, something that he blames on the passivity of US allies and Libyan tribal divisions.

Three years later, the collapse of Libya into anarchy and warlord rule served as warning to Obama against military intervention in Syria where he rightly calculated that the Libya disaster would be repeated.

The calamitous Libyan precedent has had no such impact on Cameron or the Foreign Secretary, Philip Hammond, who continue to advocate armed action using arguments which President Obama has abandoned as discredited by events as well as being a self-serving attempt by others to piggy-back on American power.

It will become clearer after November’s presidential election how far Obama’s realistic take on Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Pakistan and other US allies and his scepticism about the US foreign policy establishment will be shared by the new administration. The omens are not very good since Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, intervention in Libya in 2011 and bombing Syria in 2013. If she wins the White House, then the Saudis and the US foreign policy establishment will breathe more easily.

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Some Companies Are More Powerful Than Many Countries

By Parag Khanna, Foreign Policy, March 16, 2016:

At first glance, the story of Accenture reads like the archetype of the American dream. One of the world’s biggest consulting companies, which commands tens of billions of dollars in annual revenues, was born in the 1950s as a small division of accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Its first major project was advising General Electric to install a computer at a Kentucky facility in order to automate payment processing. Several decades of growth followed, and by 1989, the division was successful enough to become its own organization: Andersen Consulting.

Yet a deeper look at the business shows its ascent veering off the American track. This wasn’t because it opened foreign offices in Mexico, Japan, and other countries; international expansion is pro forma for many U.S. companies. Rather, Andersen Consulting saw benefits–fewer taxes, cheaper labor, less onerous regulations–beyond borders and restructured internally to take advantage of them. By 2001, when it went public after adopting the name Accenture, it had morphed into a network of franchises loosely coordinated out of a Swiss holding company. It incorporated in Bermuda and stayed there until 2009, when it redomiciled in Ireland, another low-tax jurisdiction. Today, Accenture’s roughly 373,000 employees are scattered across more than 200 cities in 55 countries. Consultants parachute into locations for commissioned work but often report to offices in regional hubs, such as Prague and Dubai, with lower tax rates. To avoid pesky residency status, the human resources department ensures that employees don’t spend too much time at their project sites.

Welcome to the age of metanationals: companies that, like Accenture, are effectively stateless. When business and strategy experts Yves Doz, José Santos, and Peter Williamson coined the term in a 2001 book, metanationals were an emerging phenomenon, a divergence from the tradition of corporations taking pride in their national roots. (In the 1950s, General Motors President Charles Wilson famously said, “What was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”) Today, the severing of state lifelines has become business as usual.

ExxonMobil, Unilever, BlackRock, HSBC, DHL, Visa–these companies all choose locations for personnel, factories, executive suites, or bank accounts based on where regulations are friendly, resources abundant, and connectivity seamless. Clever metanationals often have legal domicile in one country, corporate management in another, financial assets in a third, and administrative staff spread over several more. Some of the largest American-born firms–GE, IBM, Microsoft, to name a few–collectively are holding trillions of dollars tax-free offshore by having revenues from overseas markets paid to holding companies incorporated in Switzerland, Luxembourg, the Cayman Islands, or Singapore. In a nice illustration of the tension this trend creates with policymakers, some observers have dubbed the money “stateless income,” while U.S. President Barack Obama has called the companies hoarding it America’s “corporate deserters.”

It isn’t surprising, of course, when companies find new ways to act in their own interest; it’s surprising when they don’t. The rise of metanationals, however, isn’t just about new ways of making money. It also unsettles the definition of “global superpower.”

The debate over that term usually focuses on states–that is, can any country compete with America’s status and influence? In June 2015, the Pew Research Center surveyed people in 40 countries and found that a median of 48 percent thought China had or would surpass the United States as a superpower, while just 35 percent said it never would. Pew, however, might have considered widening its scope of research–for corporations are likely to overtake all states in terms of clout.

Already, the cash that Apple has on hand exceeds the GDPs of two-thirds of the world’s countries. Firms are also setting the pace vis-à-vis government regulators in a perennial game of cat-and-mouse. After the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to discourage banks from growing excessively big and catastrophe-prone. Yet while the law crushed some smaller financial institutions, the largest banks–with operations spread across many countries–actually became even larger, amassing more capital and lending less. Today, the 10 biggest banks still control almost 50 percent of assets under management worldwide. Meanwhile, some European Union officials, including Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager, are pushing for a common tax-base policy among member states to prevent corporations from taking advantage of preferential rates. But if that happened (and it’s a very big if), firms would just look beyond the continent for metanational opportunities.

The world is entering an era in which the most powerful law is not that of sovereignty but that of supply and demand. As scholar Gary Gereffi of Duke University has argued, denationalization now involves companies assembling the capacities of various locations into their global value chains. This has birthed success for companies, such as commodities trader Glencore and logistics firm Archer Daniels Midland, that don’t focus primarily on manufacturing goods, but are experts at getting the physical ingredients of what metanationals make wherever they’re needed.

Could businesses go a step further, shifting from stateless to virtual? Some people think so. In 2013, Balaji Srinivasan, now a partner at the venture-capital company Andreessen Horowitz, gave a much debated talk in which he claimed Silicon Valley is becoming more powerful than Wall Street and the U.S. government. He described “Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit,” or the creation of “an opt-in society, ultimately outside the U.S., run by technology.” The idea is that because social communities increasingly exist online, businesses and their operations might move entirely into the cloud.

Much as the notion of taxing a metanational based on its headquarters’ location now seems painfully antiquated, Srinivasan’s ultimate exit may ring of techie utopianism. If stateless companies live by one rule, however, it’s that there’s always another place to go where profits are higher, oversight friendlier, and opportunities more plentiful. This belief has helped nimble, mobile, and smart corporations outgrow their original masters, including the world’s reigning superpower. Seen in this light, metanationals disassociating from terrestrial restraints and harnessing the power of the cloud is anything but far-fetched. It may even be inevitable.

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Putin’s Syria Tactics Keep Him at the Fore and Leave Everyone Else Guessing

By Neil MacFarquhar, NY Times, March 15, 2016:

MOSCOW–President Vladimir V. Putin’s order to withdraw the bulk of Russian forces from Syria, a process that the Defense Ministry said it began on Tuesday, seemingly caught Washington, Damascus and everybody in between off guard–just the way the Russian leader likes it.

By all accounts, Mr. Putin delights at creating surprises, reinforcing Russia’s newfound image as a sovereign, global heavyweight and keeping him at the center of world events.

In the case of Syria, the sudden, partial withdrawal more than five months after an equally surprising intervention allows Mr. Putin to claim a list of achievements without a significant cost to Russia in blood or rubles.

If the roughly 4,000 Russian troops centered on a contingent of about 50 combat aircraft had remained in Syria, Mr. Putin risked becoming just another proxy force fighting for the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. But Mr. Putin wanted to make his mark by forging a solution in Syria, rather than lingering long enough to validate President Obama’s contention that Moscow had jumped headfirst into a quagmire.

“Russia does not want to fight for Assad as such,” said Aleksei V. Makarkin, the deputy director of the Center for Political Technologies in Moscow. “If Russia continued, that would make it more dependent on Mr. Assad and would make it clash with other players directly.”

Analysts noted that Mr. Putin had achieved most, if not all, of his goals–some stated, others not.

First, to thwart another Western attempt to push for leadership change in Syria and to fight the very idea of outside governments forcing political shifts.

Second, to show that Moscow is a more reliable ally than Washington, given that the Obama administration had abandoned long-term allies like former President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt when they faced political upheaval.

Third, to restore to Russia the role it had in the Soviet era as an important actor in the Middle East and as a global problem solver, and to force respect for Mr. Putin as a world leader.

Fourth, to shatter the isolation that Washington had tried to impose on Moscow after the crisis in Ukraine, forging a dialogue with the United States and, to a lesser degree, with Europe.

Fifth, a subset of the previous goal, to distract attention from the war in Ukraine and to get lifted the economic sanctions imposed on Russia–a step the Kremlin is desperate to achieve in the face of continuing economic problems. Saving the estimated $3 million daily cost of the Syrian operations will also help, but it was not considered decisive.

Sixth, to show off the effectiveness of a new generation of weaponry from Russia, the biggest arms exporter in the world after the United States.

Many analysts thought the main goal, of forcing a dialogue with the United States and of reviving the Cold War idea that Washington and Moscow are the main global police forces, had been achieved. Mr. Obama’s spokesman first said that the president had no idea about plans for a Russian withdrawal, but soon after the Kremlin website noted that the Russian and American leaders had spoken by telephone.

“The resurrection from oblivion of Russian-U.S. cooperation is one of the most important political results of the operation,” Vladimir Frolov, an expert on international relations, wrote on the Russian website Slon.ru. “It turns out only two superpowers can stop the war.”

The arrival of the decision like a jack-in-the-box was vintage Putin. According to published accounts of how he seized Crimea from Ukraine in March 2014, the Russian president, a former K.G.B. operative, consults a tiny circle of security and military advisers on crucial foreign policy questions.

The partial cease-fire in Syria, which began Feb. 27, has proved more effective and durable than expected, significantly reducing the level of violence.

They also believe that surprise announcements provide a giant public relations payoff, keeping Russians riveted to the TV news and making them feel that they are included in a parade of thrilling events, Ms. Schulmann said.

“A good decision in today’s Russia should be swift and surprising and take everyone unawares,” she said. “That is considered good political management.”

They are also meant to emphasize that Russia acts alone. “The main goal is to show that Russia acts completely independently,” said Alexander Morozov, an independent political analyst. “We expand our military presence without any prior consultations and wrap it up without any warning.”

Some analysts said the sudden decision was intended to send a message to Mr. Assad, who by all accounts has exasperated Mr. Putin by becoming ever more inflexible at the negotiating table as his battlefield fortunes have improved.

Mr. Assad recently earned a rebuke from Russia for saying that he would continue fighting until he had unified all of Syria, and after his foreign minister dismissed talk of presidential elections, which are supposed to be part of a transition to peace. Arab diplomats in Damascus said that their Russian counterparts had emphasized in recent weeks that Russia was intervening to protect the Syrian state, not Mr. Assad himself.

“I think this is a shot into Assad’s bow, not over Assad’s bow, as Putin’s way of saying that it is now up to you,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of the Eurasia Group, a Washington-based consulting firm. “At least for now, Putin is a looming maven of peace, and that is pretty clever.”

The stated goal of the military deployment in Syria was to take the fight against the metastasizing Islamic State to the “terrorists” themselves, before they could take the fight to Russia.

Instead, the main targets proved to be immediate threats to Mr. Assad in western Syria, many of them allied with Western or Arab powers. In summarizing the achievements of the mission, Mr. Shoigu, the defense minister, noted that Russia had helped the government restore control over 400 towns and nearly 4,000 square miles of territory.

Some analysts in Russia and elsewhere also said they thought that Mr. Putin had begun to realize that the violence that Russia was helping to perpetuate in Syria was working at cross purposes with the goal of showing Europe that he is a reliable partner and a peacemaker who does not deserve the economic sanctions that are denying Russia desperately needed access to Western credit markets.

The European Union has hinged lifting sanctions to putting into effect the Minsk II peace accords in Ukraine. The Europeans have also been alarmed that the escalating violence in Syria, now entering its sixth year, is feeding an enormous refugee crisis.

If Damascus begins to flounder without Russian support, the withdrawal is instantly reversible. Dmitri S. Peskov, Mr. Putin’s spokesman, noted that not all forces would be withdrawn from the Hmeymim air base near Latakia, nor from the longstanding Russian naval refueling and repair facility at Tartus.

Russia will also keep its powerful S-400 air defense system in Syria to protect the forces staying behind, Mr. Ivanov, the head of the president’s administration, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying. That would maintain Russian dominance of Syrian airspace, where bombers were still carrying out attacks on Palmyra on Tuesday, even as others were shown on Russian TV flying home.

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In ‘Screenagers,’ What to Do About Too Much Screen Time

By Jennifer Jolly, NY Times, March 15, 2016:

In the new documentary “Screenagers,” children can’t resist the pull of electronic devices, and parents don’t know what to do about it.

Sound familiar?

The average child in America spends more time consuming electronic media than going to school, with many teenagers going online “almost constantly.” And parents aren’t necessarily being good role models. A British study showed that while six in 10 parents worried that their children spend too much time in front of a screen, seven in 10 children worry that their parents are the ones who are plugged in and tuned out.

Dr. Delaney Ruston, the director of “Screenagers” and a physician serving as filmmaker in residence at Stony Brook Medicine in New York, says that screen time remains a topic that’s often contentious and downright confusing. I spoke with Dr. Ruston about her own family’s messy struggles with digital distractions, and about the surprising insights she learned making this film. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.

Q. Where did the idea for this documentary come from?

A. When I started the film, I was a mom having a hard time with my own teenage kids. My 14-year-old son wanted to play more video games, and my 12-year-old daughter was always on social media. I was at a loss. I would suddenly get mad and then feel guilty. I realized speaking with other parents that we all felt paralyzed about our kids and screen overload and that it’s only getting worse.

At the same time, I was seeing more of this issue with my patients. As a primary care doctor, I saw more and more kids of all ages and backgrounds glued to a screen. I felt a real need to understand the science around screen time and kids. And as a filmmaker who has worked on other movies for social change, I wanted to share my journey in order to help others who are struggling with these issues as well.

Q. What’s the impact of modern technology on our children’s brains?

A. Excessive use of screens could harm the physical development of young people’s brains. Studies show a correlation between too much screen time and worse attention spans, as well as negative effects on learning. We talk about two really important studies in the film, one with mice and another with preschoolers.

In the first study, scientists found that when young mice are repeatedly exposed to flashing sounds and lights that mimic screen time, they develop fewer nerve cells in the parts of the brain that control learning and memory. The same stimulus doesn’t affect brains of adult mice. There’s something unique about the way screen time impacts the developing brain.

In the other study with preschoolers, researchers divided 60 kids into two groups. Half watched fast-paced images on screens for about 10 minutes, while the other half drew with crayons in another room. Then all the kids took the same test of cognitive skills. The kids who were exposed to the screens did significantly worse on the exams.

Our current fast-paced digital media, from flash games and online videos, to social media feeds and constant texting, seems to tire the brain. This has major implications for kids and how they reach their full academic potential.

Q. The movie starts with your almost 13-year-old daughter trying to convince you she needs a smartphone. What’s the big lesson for other parents here?

A. I want every parent to know two main scientific facts: The first is that the part of the brain responsible for things such as planning, decision-making and impulse control (the frontal cortex) grows slowly over the teen years and is not fully developed until our 20s. The second is that screen time releases the chemical dopamine in the reward centers of the brain, and there is no other time in life when you’re as susceptible to that pleasure-producing chemical than in adolescence.

The worst thing a parent can do is hand over a smartphone and hope for the best. But parents often feel like trying to set limits is pointless, that the cat is out of the bag, tech is everywhere. I hear all kinds of excuses. But kids’ brains aren’t wired to self-regulate. They can’t do it without you, and they shouldn’t have to.

Q. What should parents do then?

A. Given the right guidelines, kids can increase self-control over time. And that’s a more important indicator of success than even I.Q. I was really surprised, and you’ll see in the film, kids consistently told me that they want rules around their screen time.

So you have set guidelines. Two of our rules are: No phones in bedrooms at night, and no phone use in the car. We use alarm clocks and talk with each other instead. Those are the easy ones. For the rest of the “rules,” and what you’ll see after a few painful mistakes on my part in the film, is that it’s best to create a contract with your kids’ input.

Q. It also helps if mom and dad aren’t checking their phone every five minutes.

A. That’s right. Kids don’t want to be held to a higher standard than their parents, and that’s a big issue. You can’t punish your kids for breaking the rules when you can’t put your own devices down. Also, don’t make rules that don’t make sense, and remember that humans respond better to reward than punishment.

Q. Speaking of punishment, there’s a part in the movie where a parent is scared of taking away video games because of the huge fights it causes.

A. Whenever we try to enforce a screen limit there can be a tremendous backlash. Knowing the science behind this behavior helps to understand why kids respond so fiercely in the heat of the moment.

The dopamine we get from screen time is the same chemical released with activities such as drinking alcohol. The many hours of dopamine released with screen-based activities can affect the brain in serious ways. For example, research shows that those who play a lot of video games–about three hours a day–have M.R.I. brain scans that reveal similar patterns as people addicted to drugs.

Q. You don’t sugarcoat the potential for disaster here.

A. On any given day, 70 percent of boys are playing video games, and they play close to 2.5 hours a day, seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.

People like to rebut any negative talk about video games with the evidence that some games can improve visual acuity and problem solving. But are we, as parents, as a society, comfortable with kids giving up 15 plus hours of their lives every week for these video games they’re playing? Do you even know what games they’re playing?

Eighty percent of video games have violent content. With these games, the data shows an increased risk in aggressive thoughts and actions. It is not surprising that these games are not increasing thoughts of empathy and generosity–the traits that I would hope as a society we would want to promote.

The good news is that data also reveals that prosocial video games increase the chance that kids will be more helpful to others. Those are the games where you work to help someone, build a community or collaborate with others in a positive way. I just wish the industry would develop more “cool” prosocial games.

Q. What do you hope happens now that the film is out and people are talking about it?

A. I want to spark a movement to get everyone, from parents to policymakers, to watch the movie, then have a “town hall” style conversation afterward about how we can best help kids lead more balanced lives. I see this as the first step.

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Russia begins withdrawal from Syria as peace talks get underway

By Michael Birnbaum, Washington Post, March 15, 2016

MOSCOW–Russian forces began to withdraw from Syria on Tuesday, hours after a surprise announcement from Russian President Vladimir Putin that he would end his nation’s military deployment as suddenly as he started it.

The pullback, which came as peace talks got underway in Geneva, threw a new twist into the bloody conflict, which marked its fifth anniversary on Tuesday. After rescuing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad from the verge of defeat, Putin now appears to be pressuring his longtime ally to reach a deal.

The Russian Defense Ministry announced Tuesday that “personnel are currently loading equipment, logistics support means and property onto military-transport airplanes.”

By midday in Syria, groups of Russia fighter jets and military transport planes were taking off from the coastal Hmeimim air base in Latakia on their way home to Russia.

But even as Russian servicemen were departing, some limits on the withdrawal were already taking shape. Russia plans to leave its powerful S-400 surface-to-air missile systems in place in Syria, a senior Russian official said. That means that Russia will continue to control Syrian airspace, a powerful deterrent to nations such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia–and even the United States–that might contemplate instituting no-fly zones over parts of Syrian territory.

Russian advisers embedded with the Syrian military also planned to remain, Russian media reported, citing unnamed sources.

“When it is seen that the political component will move forward successfully, and the Syrian army and police are capable of destroying hotbeds of terrorism in Syria on their own, then we will possibly think about the S-400” and its removal, the chairman of the defense and security committee of Russia’s upper house of parliament, Viktor Ozerov, told the Interfax news agency.

The six-month deployment helped Assad forces retake almost 4,000 square miles of territory–nearly the size of Connecticut–eliminating the possibility that he might be deposed by force. It bolstered Russia’s main ally in the Arab world. It also bought Russia a role as a major player on the international stage, forcing the United States and other Western allies to bargain with them after two years of isolation after Ukraine.

But Putin had always said that the deployment would be limited, and he appears to have concluded that Russia’s major aims were achieved after six months of airstrikes and other help to Assad’s forces.

Overall, the cease-fire has brought a measure of peace to the devastated country.

Tuesday’s pullout appears to put pressure on Syrian leaders to reach a deal in Geneva, even as Russia retains the flexibility to quickly redeploy should it find that necessary.

Assad envoys and representatives from the Syrian opposition were engaged in U.N.-brokered talks this week, although they appeared to be starting slowly. Staffan de Mistura, the U.N. envoy leading the bargaining, met Monday with regime envoys and was due to meet later Tuesday with the opposition leaders, who planned to mark the grim five-year anniversary with a ceremony in a garden at the U.N. headquarters in Geneva.

In central Damascus, there was little sign of the anniversary of the conflict, which began with mass protests against Assad’s government. The regime does not mark the occasion. Streets were filled with commuters and shoppers as usual.

Russian state television–always a reliable barometer of the message that the Kremlin wants to send its citizens–moved quickly to portray the pullout as a capstone to a successful Russian military foray. Even the meteorologists got involved, showing the flightpaths of the planes and the likely weather along the way, including some thunderstorms.

The mission was Russia’s first overseas combat deployment since the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union, and military leaders here had been eager to show off their abilities. Russian military analysts spoke brightly of the good training that Russian soldiers were getting; the Defense Ministry even shifted part of its training budget to Syria.

Analysts said that Putin may prefer to exit Syria on a high note, before becoming bogged down and exposing the Russian military to further risks.

The move is likely to be received well in Russia, where ordinary citizens have supported the intervention, according to opinion polls. But Russians still hold painful memories of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, which cost many Russian lives and helped speed the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Danish shoppers are snapping up expired food

By Story Hinckley, CS Monitor, March 14, 2016:

Denmark opened its first food waste supermarket last month, and it is proving to be a big success.

Volunteers at WeFood, a brainchild of Danish NGO Folkekirkens Nødhjælp, pick up food from large supermarkets that has either passed its official expiration date or has aesthetic imperfections and bring it back to the Copenhagen-based store. All products sold at WeFood are 30 to 50 percent cheaper than their wholesale counterparts, attracting both low-income bargain hunters as well as environmental and socially-minded advocates.

And WeFood has had a hard time keeping its shelves stocked.

“It’s fantastic. It shows that people want to buy the goods,” Per Bjerregaard, the press officer at Folkekirkens Nødhjælp, tells The Copenhagen Post. “I’m not quite sure that we have time to restock everything for tomorrow–so much has been sold.”

The first day of sales, Feb. 23, saw between 800 and 900 transactions, says Bjerregaard. If WeFood continues to see success, Folkekirkens Nødhjælp says it will open similar stores across Denmark.

Each year, Danes throw away over 1.5 billion pounds of food. And with 842 million people, or 12 percent of the world’s population, going to bed hungry every day, even the Danish waste alone could make an impact.

And while WeFood is not Denmark’s first food waste supermarket, but according to Bjerregaard it is the first one aimed at the general public.

The recently resigned Danish Minister for Food and Environment, Eva Kjer Hansen, tells The Independent that she supports WeFood’s solution.

“It’s ridiculous that food is just thrown out or goes to waste,” says Hansen. “A supermarket like WeFood makes so much sense and is an important step in the battle to combat food waste.”

All profits from the food sold at WeFood is used to support anti-poverty efforts around the world.

And even before WeFood, the Danes had made a name for themselves as a leader in food waste prevention. According to a report released by the Danish government last year, the Scandinavian country now wastes 25 percent less food than they did five years ago. This translates to 35 pounds of food saved per person per year.

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Hillary Clinton’s Deep Ties to Haiti Show Signs of Strain

By Yamiche Alcindor, NY Times, March 14, 2016:

Carrying horns, handwritten signs and bottles of gasoline to set tires on fire, a group of men marched into one of the many protests that have paralyzed parts of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, this year.

They were angry with their president, who let Parliament collapse and failed to hold scheduled elections. They were angry with the United Nations for not ensuring a fair vote for his successor. And they were angry with the former American secretary of state who had helped put him in power.

“You see all these people here?” said one of the Haitian-flag-draped protesters, Jean Renold Cenatus, who said he was unemployed. “It’s because of what Mrs. Clinton did five years ago that we are facing this situation.”

In their post-2000 lives as global citizens, Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton have been tied to no country more closely than Haiti. As a United Nations special envoy, Mr. Clinton helped raise hundreds of millions of dollars for the country after its devastating 2010 earthquake. Mrs. Clinton traveled there four times as secretary of state and shepherded billions of dollars in American aid.

They often speak fondly of Haiti, one of the first places they visited as newlyweds in 1975.

“We came here for the first time together, just after we were married, and fell in love with Haiti,” Mrs. Clinton said in 2012, standing near her husband at the opening of a Haitian industrial park she helped to finance. “We have had a deep connection to and with Haiti ever since.”

But as she seeks the world’s most powerful job and Haiti plunges into another political abyss, a loud segment of Haitians and Haitian-Americans is speaking of the Clintons with the same contempt they reserve for some of their past leaders.

In widely read blogs, in protests in Port-au-Prince and outside Mrs. Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, and on popular call-in radio shows in Florida, where primaries will be held on Tuesday, the Clintons have become prime targets of blame for the country’s woes.

Among the litany of complaints being laid at their feet: Fewer than half the jobs promised at the industrial park, built after 366 farmers were evicted from their lands, have materialized. Many millions of dollars earmarked for relief efforts have yet to be spent. Mrs. Clinton’s brother Tony Rodham has turned up in business ventures on the island, setting off speculation about insider deals.

“A vote for Hillary Clinton means further corruption, further death and destruction for our people,” said Dahoud Andre, a radio show host in New York who has helped organize protests against the Clintons. “It means more Haitians leaving Haiti and not being able to live in our country.”

And now, Michel Martelly, a president whom Mrs. Clinton helped get elected has turned out to be another in a long line of troubling leaders.

Tony Jeanthenor, 55, a member of the Miami-based Haitian human rights group Veye-Yo as well as Lavalas Family, a Haitian political party, said he was voting for Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont because of the senator’s distaste for involvement in other countries’ affairs.

“Nothing good for Haiti can come out of Hillary because of her past behavior,” Mr. Jeanthenor said.

The dismay over Mrs. Clinton in South Florida’s Haitian community is not likely to affect her fortunes on Tuesday, as she holds a comfortable lead over Mr. Sanders in state polls. Whether it could damage her in a general election is unclear. An estimated 150,000 Haitian-American voters live in Florida, the state where 537 votes decided the 2000 election. But they have also overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, according to Fernand R. Amandi, a principal partner of Bendixen & Amandi International, a public opinion research firm in Miami that has polled Haitian-Americans extensively.

Jean Monestime, a Haitian-American who is the chairman of the Miami-Dade County Commission as well as a chairman of Caribbean Americans for Hillary, said he had spoken to the Clinton campaign about the criticisms. But many Haitian-Americans in South Florida still appreciate her efforts on the country’s behalf, he said, and intended to vote for her.

The others should not “keep whining and complaining,” he said, because if another candidate wins, one who is less interested in Haiti, “we are going to be marginalized by the change.”

Jake Sullivan, Mrs. Clinton’s deputy chief of staff for policy at the State Department and now the senior policy adviser for her campaign, said the United States’ work under Mrs. Clinton’s leadership “certainly had a significant impact in support of Haiti’s recovery.”

“Our commitment of more than $4 billion since 2010 has helped provide shelter for more than 300,000 Haitians; health care for more than half the country in U.S.-supported facilities; train a new national police force; and raise the average incomes of tens of thousands of farmers,” Mr. Sullivan said in an email. “Secretary Clinton is extremely proud of the work she and her team have done since the earthquake.”

But to many Haitians, the most significant moment of Mrs. Clinton’s tenure as secretary of state was in 2011, when she flew to Haiti to pressure President René Préval to admit Mr. Martelly, a popular recording artist, into a two-person runoff for president. Mr. Martelly was third in initial voting, but the Organization of American States believed that the man who was second, Mr. Préval’s pick, had benefited from vote fraud.

The night of the runoff, which Mr. Martelly won, Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl D. Mills, wrote a congratulatory note to top American diplomats in Haiti.

“You do great elections,” Ms. Mills wrote in a message released by the State Department among a batch of Mrs. Clinton’s emails. She wrote that she would buy dinner the next time she visited: “We can discuss how the counting is going! Just kidding. Kinda. :)”

Ms. Mills’s email may have been intended as tongue-in-cheek, but it has fed a suspicion among Haitians, if lacking in proof, that the United States rigged the election to install a puppet president.

And as Mr. Martelly slowly concentrated power around him and gave important jobs to friends with criminal pasts, the woman who had helped put him in the runoff began to come under attack. (Mr. Martelly left office last month, as scheduled, but without a successor in place.)

After Mrs. Clinton declared her candidacy for president, calls began coming in to Mr. Andre’s radio show, like one in June in which a woman lamented that she and her late father had been supporters of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and had donated money to help elect each to office. “When they did good things, we should applaud,” the woman said in Haitian Creole. “But when they do bad things, we should denounce them because it is not good. And Hillary Clinton is not good.”

The activities of Mr. Rodham, Mrs. Clinton’s brother, are frequently mentioned on the shows. Last year a book, “Clinton Cash” by Peter Schweizer, revealed that in 2013, Mr. Rodham was added to the advisory board of a company that owns a gold mine in Haiti. He and the company’s chief executive both told The Washington Post they had been introduced at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, an arm of the Clinton Foundation. Officials at the foundation said they had not played a part in Mr. Rodham’s joining the mining company.

Mr. Rodham and several partners also sought a $22 million deal to rebuild homes in the country while Mr. Clinton was leading the recovery commission. They were not successful.

While there is no evidence that Mr. Rodham got preferential treatment, his ventures were quickly inflated into rumors, heard often on the streets and airwaves, that the Clintons had been busy buying land in Haiti for profit.

Outspoken activists like Ezili Dantò, a human rights lawyer who founded the Haitian Lawyers Leadership Network, say they cannot help believing that Mrs. Clinton gave her brother a hand.

“She is looked upon as a liberal and someone who respects human rights, workers’ rights and so forth,” Ms. Dantò said. “But we haven’t had that experience with her in Haiti.”

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