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.

The Frigid Isle
Íris Erlingsdóttir shines a light on the world’s first wholly feminized state. Women, she writes in The European Conservative, run everything in Iceland: “the presidency, the prime minister’s office…[the] national state church…schools, municipalities, police…newsrooms and [the] ever-expanding public bureaucracy.” As for the men, Erlingsdóttir observes, they describe themselves ruefully as (bad-taste alert) “pussy-whipped.”


