It was Alabama that brought the country the Voting Rights Act (VRA) because of its brutality against black citizens in places like Selma. “The Voting Rights Act is Alabama’s gift to our country,” the civil-rights lawyer Debo Adegbile once said. And it was a county in Alabama–Shelby County–that brought the 2013 challenge that gutted the VRA. As a result of that ruling, those states with the worst histories of voting discrimination, including Alabama, no longer have to approve their voting changes with the federal government. After the Shelby County decision, Alabama’s strict voter ID law, passed by the GOP legislature in 2011, was…

ina’s announcement that it will launch a national carbon-trading market in 2017 and give $3 billion toCH developing countries to help them fight climate change underscores the sea change that six years have wrought for the world’s biggest source of carbon pollution. It also means that China, nominally a communist country, is using a capitalist approach to solve a devilish environmental problem, while the United States, the second-largest emitter, is stuck with top-down regulations and government mandates to try to achieve the same goal. Presidents Barack Obama of the United States and Xi Jinping of China announced the new measures at a…

The growing list of the ways in which climate change is reshaping life on Earth has an unusual new addition: shorter bee tongues. Over the past 40 years, warmer, drier weather has reduced flower populations in some regions of the Rocky Mountains in North America, forcing bees to work harder to find nectar. At the same time, bee tongues in those regions have got shorter, according to a study published in Science[1]. The change to the bees’ anatomy probably arose because longer-tongued bees tend to be picky eaters, dining mainly on nectar from deep flowers, says lead author Nicole Miller-Struttmann, an…

In deciding to ban religious arbitration in provincial family law, Premier Dalton McGuinty has done a great disservice to a number of religious groups in Ontario, and nothing to safeguard the interests of Muslim women. By apparently succumbing to the polemics of anti- sharia groups that confused cultural patriarchies, bad-faith husbands, and incompetent imams with the totality of what arbitration under sharia could offer, the Premier has missed a real opportunity to support Muslim women in Canada and human-rights activists the world over. Let's be clear: With the ban on sharia arbitration, there will be no positive gain for Muslim women. They are in exactly the…

Throughout Islamic history, one of the uniting aspects of the Muslim world was the caliphate. After the death of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, his close companion, Abu Bakr, was elected as the first khalifah, or caliph, of the Muslim community. His job as leader combined political power over the Muslim state as well as spiritual guidance for Muslims. It became a hereditary position, occupied at first by the Umayyad family, and later by the Abbasids. In 1517, the caliphate was transferred to the Ottoman family, who ruled the largest and most powerful empire in the world in the 1500s. For centuries,…