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Following George Floyd's death, the nation may not be ready for reparations on racism issues but the "church can lead the way in biblical restitution," according to the president and CEO of Christianity Today. Timothy Dalrymple said "repentance alone is not enough" for white evangelicals to atone for the nation's "original sin" of racism in an op-ed for the magazine. "The virus of racism infected our church, our Constitution and laws, our attitudes and ideologies. We have never fully defeated it," Dalrymple wrote.

In the days—simultaneously not so very long ago and in the ancient past—when communism seemed a permanent feature of he political landscape, I traveled extensively on the other side of the looking glass that divided the world into two opposed camps. I did not take with me as literary guide and compass to my travels one of the Marxist-Leninist "classics"...

... My guess about the late Mr. Epstein’s taste for orgies is that it was only partially sexual in origin. After all, a man in his situation could have paid for any amount of sex, of any kind, in private. What he really enjoyed (I surmise) is corrupting others—and not just others, but prominent and powerful others. He enjoyed being, or playing, Mephistopheles, quite apart from any sexual gratification he may have had on the way. ...

Even the arrests after each attack give comfort to the enemy, which can act with impunity even if known. From all this the terrorists surely draw a great deal of comfort. It gives them the impression of living in a weak society that will be easy to destroy, so that their acts are not in the least nihilistic or pointless, as is often claimed. They perceive ours as a candle-and-teddy-bear society (albeit mysteriously endowed with technological prowess): We kill, you light candles. The other day I passed a teddy-bear shop, that is to say a shop that sold nothing but...

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple on Monday ordered deep cuts to government agencies and a massive raid on state savings to make up for a more than $1 billion budget shortfall due to depressed crude prices and a drop in oil drilling. The state had more than $2 billion in various reserve accounts just one year ago, but oil prices - a key contributor to the state's wealth - have taken a nosedive in the past year. The Legislature's record-high $14.4 billion budget for the two years that began July 1 was built on oil prices and economic assumptions that...

North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple announced Monday that he will not run for re-election next year, blowing the gubernatorial race wide open and intensifying speculation over whether Democratic U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp will seek the state’s highest office. The 66-year-old Dalrymple said in a news release that he and first lady Betsy Dalrymple plan to spend more time with family, including their five grandchildren. “It continues to be my great privilege to serve my state, service that includes 16 years as a state representative, 10 years as lieutenant governor and (the) last five-plus years as governor,” he said. “North Dakota...

First time I've seen him interviewed, ....discussing destructive cultural trends...... he imagines that Hilary Clinton's life has no meaning even to herself if she isn't running for office....

BISMARCK – For the third time in six years, North Dakota lawmakers have killed legislation that would ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, despite warnings from some Democrats and Republicans that it could tarnish the growing state’s image and attract backlash similar to what Indiana and Arkansas have faced in recent days. Kevin Tengesdal, a gay U.S. Navy veteran from Bismarck who had testified for the bill and helped fill the House balcony in support of it Thursday, brushed away tears and hugged fellow supporters outside the chamber after the vote. “It was disheartening. When can our voice be heard?”...

North Dakota on Tuesday adopted the most restrictive abortion law in the United States, as the governor signed a bill that bans the procedure in most cases once a fetal heartbeat can be detected, as early as six weeks. Supporters of abortion rights said they would challenge the measure in court. Governor Jack Dalrymple on Tuesday also signed a bill that bans abortions based solely on genetic abnormalities, the first state ban of its kind, or based on the gender of the fetus. North Dakota is the latest state to pass measures to restrict abortions. Arkansas lawmakers earlier in March...

BISMARCK -- Gov. Jack Dalrymple signed legislation this afternoon repealing the North Dakota law that mandates use of the UND Fighting Sioux nickname. Earlier, by a lopsided margin almost exactly opposite of the vote they cast to defend UND's Fighting Sioux nickname and logo in February, members of the North Dakota House approved a bill today to repeal their earlier action and clear the way for the nickname's retirement. The vote was 63-31, sending the bill to Dalrymple, who at the start of this week's special session had asked the Legislature to repeal the nickname mandate. The Senate had approved...

When my mother arrived in England as a refugee from Nazi Germany, shortly before the outbreak of World War II, she found the people admirable, though not without the defects that corresponded to their virtues. By the time she died, two-thirds of a century later, she found them rude, dishonest, and charmless. They did not seem to her, moreover, to have any virtues to compensate for their unpleasant qualities. I occasionally asked her to think of some, but she couldnÂ’t; and neither, frankly, could I. It wasnÂ’t simply that she had been robbed twice during her last five years, having...

THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class. They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.

The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

We hardly needed WikiLeaks to tell us, among many other things, that Nicolas Sarkozy, the president of France, is a vulgar man with authoritarian inclinations, or that Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, is interested in sex. It isn’t even particularly reassuring to have our judgments confirmed for us by American diplomatic messages, for if they had said anything different we shouldn’t have believed them in any case. After the first slight frisson of pleasure at the discomfiture of powerful people and those in authority has worn off, a pleasure akin to that of seeing a pompously dignified man slip...

A scramble for rotting fish: decades of foreign aid have not helped Tanzanians. Randy Olson/National Geographic/Getty ImagesTo sympathize with those who are less fortunate is honorable and decent. A man able to commiserate only with himself would surely be neither admirable nor attractive. But every virtue can become deformed by excess, insincerity, or loose thinking into an opposing vice. Sympathy, when excessive, moves toward sentimental condescension and eventually disdain; when insincere, it becomes unctuously hypocritical; and when associated with loose thinking, it is a bad guide to policy and frequently has disastrous results. It is possible, of course, to...

A recent article in The Lancet is titled "North Korea’s health system in disarray" — but that implies that it was ever actually in array in the first place. When I was a prison doctor, my patients — the prisoners — would often try moral blackmail. If I did not give them what they wanted, they said, they would kill someone, and then it would be on my conscience. I never gave in to the blackmail, and eventually the prisoners abandoned the attempt. But I always had a niggling fear that they might carry out their threat. The fact that...

The much loved, and surely respected, Theodore Dalrymple does not like soccer. He says of soccer fans, “Try as I might to expunge the thought from my mind that this enthusiasm is a manifestation of human stupidity, I cannot.” However, it appears Dalrymple’s dislike of soccer is nothing more than a disgust of his adopted homeland’s national team. Nine-tenths of his essay is given over to picking on the French; nowadays, an all too easy avocation. He reminds us of the French soccer team’s on-camera attitude toward the Marseillaise: “[They] refused to sing it or accord it any respect.” This...

Elian Gonzalez case - 10 years later When federal agents stormed a home in the Little Havana community, snatched Elian Gonzalez from his father's relatives and put him on a path back to his father in Cuba, thousands of Cuban Americans took to Miami's streets. Their anger helped give George W. Bush the White House months later and simmered long after that. Ten years later, the Little Havana home - for weeks the epicenter of a standoff that divided the United States - is a museum dedicated to Elian's brief time in this country, but visitors are rare. Almost no...

I have noticed that whenever I used the word “Mankind” in an article, it emerges in the printed version, without my permission, as “Humankind,” a word I despise as both ugly and sanctimonious. (In the Oxfam shop round the corner from where I live there is a poster with a slogan that nauseates me: “Thankyou for Being Humankind.”) The change is made with such regularity, and in so many publications, that the government might as well have decreed it, though in fact it has not. There is, presumably, a monstrous regiment of sub-editors at work, all of like mind. Of...

Americans would do well to ponder a recent admisssion by a former minister in the Blair government. Lord Warner said that while spending on Britain's National Health Service had increased by 60 percent, its output had DECREASED by 4 percent. No doubt while the spending of Soviet-style bureaucracies like the NHS is more easily measurable than its output, the remark certainly accords with the experiences of citizens, who see no improvement. On the contrary, while the Service has taken on 400,000 new staff members - continuity of medical care has been all but extinguished! Nobody now expects to see the...