What might Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan be driving at during his private “interminable monologues” with Pope Leo XIV, wonders Fiamma Nirenstein in Jewish News Syndicate. The Pope, no doubt, wants to avert a Third World War and sees Turkey as a bridge between West and East. But having embraced Islamism and purged Turkey of nearly all its 4 million Christians, Nirenstein writes, the Turkish tyrant appears ever-less amenable to that role.
At Least He Paid his Losing Bet
Paul Ehrlich, author of the spectacularly incorrect 1968 best-seller The Population Bomb, recently died at 93. Despite his longevity, Ronald Bailey points out in Reason, Ehrlich did not live to see even one of his numerous apocalyptic predictions come true. The world’s population certainly grew, but not merely larger, richer and fatter too. Most famously, Ehrlich once bet economist Julian Simon that the world was approaching economic collapse – but in 1990 had to mail Simon a cheque.
