Investing often creates moral dilemmas over goals: Should we aim to do well or to do good? Is it appropriate to invest in tobacco companies? Or in companies that sell guns to drug gangs?

The returns of the JP Morgan Emerging Market Bond Index (EMBI+) are heavily influenced by what happens in Venezuela.

The reason is simple: while Venezuela represents only about 5% of the index, it accounts for about 20% of its yield -- because the yield on Venezuelan debt is about five times larger than that of other countries in the index, a reflection of the huge risk premium that Venezuela faces.

As has been widely reported in the media, Venezuela is experiencing one of the most calamitous economic collapses ever, accompanied by massive doses of political repression and human-rights violations.

So investing in the EMBI+ means that you rejoice when Wall Street analysts inform you that the country is literally starving its people in order to avoid restructuring your bonds. It is exactly the same with Goldman Sachs.

The 15-year-old school girl’s eyes filled with tears as she put down her mobile phone. Her best friend at school, the friend she did everything together with, had just called her.

“We can no longer be friends,” she had said. “Allah does not allow me to be friends with people like you.”

This conversation took place in a city in Indonesia with a reputation for tolerance. The two girls were students at a high school described as “the most tolerant” in the city. The caller who ended the friendship is a Muslim, the devastated recipient of the call a Christian.

An incredible tragedy is unfolding in the world’s largest Muslim country, where its democratic government and culture of tolerance is being destroyed by fanatic Islamists.  Can they be stopped in time?  And is there anyone in Indonesia with the courage to do so?

President Trump’s visit to Israel over the last two days (5/22-23) was a reminder to Israel, a nation of miracles, that miracles still happen. 

For the longest time – those eight long years of Obama – it must have seemed that the nightmare would never end.

Enter Trump and everything is different. America is back, and so is Israel. The slump is over, finished. For Israel, how refreshing to welcome an American President as a friend. Modern Israel will never be quite the same ever since this visit.

The entire world saw an American President bestow kindness, friendship, respect and protection to the Jewish State and let no one (like Iran) try anything foolish. It’s like that when the biggest guy on the block puts his arm around you for the entire neighborhood to see.

This was not the time for politics. It was the time for symbols and it was a time for television to broadcast those symbols, however limited, in America.

Trump’s magnificent farewell speech at the Israel Museum roused the audience to its feet when he said, “Iran routinely calls for Israel’s destruction – not with Donald J. Trump.”

 CNN did not play that, neither did MSNBC or ABC, CBS or NBC. Fox News and the BBC did.  And so does TTP -- full video and text below.

In the months before weeping little girls with nails in their faces were carried out of the Manchester Arena Monday evening (5/22), the authorities of that city were hard at work fighting the dreaded threat of Islamophobia.

While Salman Abedi, the second-generation Muslim refugee terrorist who maimed and killed dozens in a brutal terrorist attack, stalked the streets wailing, “There is no god but Allah and Mohammed is the messenger of Allah,” Manchester police were busy with more important things.

The Greater Manchester Police (GMP) are one of only two police forces in the UK to list Islamophobia as a hate crime category.  You might read that sentence again to let it sink in.

Earlier this year, GMP Chief Constable Ian Hopkins honored Tell Mama (“Mama” stands for “Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks”) for fighting Islamophobia.

The Islamophobia lie killed 22 people in Manchester. It happened on the watch of the GMP.

No one takes Islamophobia more seriously than the Greater Manchester Police. When Muslim “sex grooming” gangs were abusing little girls in Rochdale, the GMP dutifully covered it up. On one of the recorded interviews, a police officer can be heard yawning as a girl describes her abuse. 

Prague, Czech Republic.  The West that birthed globalization is now in an open revolt over its own offspring, from here in Eastern Europe to southern Ohio.

About half of the population in Europe and the United States seems to want to go back to the world that existed before the 1980s, when local communities had more control of their own destinies and traditions.

One reason is we have never really resolved the contradictions of globalization.

An Islamic State terrorist does not hate the United States any less because he now wears hoodies and sneakers and can text his girlfriend. More likely, Western fashion and high-tech toys only empower radical Islamic hatred of Western values.

Elites who benefit from Westernized globalization often gain enough wealth and leisure to have the latitude to trash it -- as a way of dealing with their own guilt over their exalted status.

At no time in the history of Western civilization have American college students ever been so pampered -- with latte bars, trauma counselors, rock-climbing walls and upscale student unions -- and yet so critical of the very global civilization that guaranteed them such bounty.

According to press reports, National Security Advisor to President Trump, H. R. McMaster, has appointed USAF Col. Kris A. Bauman to be the Israel Advisor to the National Security Council.

Why would Lt. Gen. McMaster appoint someone with a long history of support and sympathy for the terrorists of Hamas to advise him on Israel?

When he worked for Obama (2013-2014), he was well-known for believing that the “Israel Lobby” is a threat, that Israel should be pressured into making concessions to Islamic terrorists, and writing that “the Obama Administration must find creative (but legal) ways to include Hamas in a solution.”

Kris Bauman replaces Yael Lempert, one of the Obama holdovers that conservatives had fought to pry out of the swamp. Lempert was known as "Obama’s point person in the White House orchestrating his war against Israel.”

It’s like Yael Lempert never left.  Once McMaster took over as National Security Adviser, the swamp was back.