British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office watching the street lamps being lit below.  He turned to a friend standing next to him and observed, “The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.”  It was August 3, 1914.  World War I was beginning.

The Obama administration has sent clear signals that despite empty words of solidarity with Israel, America is firmly on the side of Hamas in the current hot war in Gaza.

 The crisis at America’s southern border continues.  But the picture is bigger than that.   According to a New York Times article (Sunday Review, July 13, 2014), a recent survey by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees interviewed 404 immigrants from Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Mexico.  The study revealed that an alleged 58 percent of the illegals streaming into this country are fleeing to escape violence in their own Central American nations. 

A few days ago Emily Letts, 25, posted a video showing her abortion. It went viral.  "I just want to share my story, to show women that there is such a thing as a positive abortion story," she says to the camera.

Everybody has been talking about it. The National Basketball Association came down hard on the Clippers’ owner, Donald Sterling.  Sterling is an old man—in his eighties.  He has owned the Clippers for thirty-three years.

It has been in the news for weeks now.  It started with the Veterans Administration Hospital in Phoenix where 40 patients are alleged to have died waiting to see a specialist. Now the scandal has spread to more than a score of other hospitals and who knows how many deaths.  

The news broke in the United Kingdom on March 24 that at twenty-seven hospitals they have been burning the remains of aborted babies to heat their buildings.  Fifteen thousand children tossed into the furnaces or waste disposal incinerators.

It’s disturbing.  Last week Brandon Eich resigned as CEO of Mozilla.   They are the company that operates the popular Firefox web browser.  Eich had been appointed to that position only a month before.  You can imagine his delight when he received the promotion.  And Mozilla was highly optimistic.

 Ukraine – Echoes of 1938

The vote is in.  Ninety-seven percent of voters in Crimea chose to join Russia.  Stalin reportedly once said, “It doesn’t matter who votes.  It matters who counts the ballots.”

 [NOTE: This item expresses the views of the individual to whom the item is ascribed and does not necessarily reflect the position of the WRF as a whole.]   

We have a Ukrainian woman, the wife of a former Soviet Air Force officer from the Cold War era, who works for us part-time in Prague.

On February 3 Temple University in Philadelphia announced its new “Fly in 4” program.   Essentially, Temple will give 500 lower income students, or seven percent of the incoming class, a grant of $4000 if they promise not to work more than ten hours a week.

At one point in his ministry Jesus became frustrated with the cities of Galilee.  Matthew tells us, “He began to reproach the cities in which most of his miracles were done, because they did not repent….’You, Capernaum, will not be exalted to heaven, will you?