Opinion

Last weekend, diplomats, presidents, and prime ministers gathered in the tiny East African nation of Djibouti. The meeting was apparently initiated by the State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs, or maybe Donald Yamamoto (the U.S. ambassador to Somalia), or perhaps it was Djiboutian President Ismail Omar Guelleh. Participants receiving the invitations said they were not quite sure. Nor did those invited initially know the agenda. Evidently, the State Department forgot to include it. Or perhaps it was not ready until the dignitaries arrived.

President Trump has invited the leaders of Kosovo and Serbia to the White House on June 27 to resolve their long-standing dispute over Kosovo’s final status. The minisummit will be presided over by Richard Grenell, Trump’s special envoy for the dialogue. Grenell has urged an accelerated resolution to the conflict, thus setting the stage for a dramatic Balkan summer.

Imagine being trapped in a small New York City apartment with a bunch of kids for months. No school, parks, playgrounds, or access to a car to escape to the suburbs like millions of other New Yorkers. When videos circulated of Hasidic Jews in Williamsburg and Boro Park breaking open the locks on park fences, a friend remarked how surprised she was to see it was the Hasidic Jews who snapped and took matters into their own hands. I couldn’t help but laugh. If you had that many kids cooped up at home with nothing to do for months, wouldn’t you?

Renaming is all the rage today. Yale University can claim credit for being a trendsetter: It renamed freshmen “first years,” stopped calling the heads of colleges “masters” (even though the derivation of the term, like the master’s degree, has nothing to do with racism or slavery), blessed the physical destruction of art so long as it depicted uncomfortable subjects, and, of course, created a follow-on Committee on Arts in Public Spaces, and then got into the renaming business by forming a Committee to Establish Principles on Renaming, the logic of which channels Orwell’s dystopia. Of course, Yale also exposes the hypocrisy with renaming. Elihu Yale, for whom the university was named, was not only a slave owner but also a slave trader and, beyond John Calhoun, whose name was stripped from a residential college, many other residential college namesakes owned slaves — theologians John Edwards and John Davenport, for example.

The liaison office which has served as a de facto embassy between North and South Korea since 2018 collapsed in ruin Tuesday, blown to pieces by the Kim Jong Un's regime.