Good story in the Wall Street Journal today about rocker-activist Bob Geldof and how he’s spearheading a push by private-equity firms into Ethiopia to effect a “historic shift from aid to trade.” Investments are flowing into private sector projects such as a flower farm, a pany, pipeline building modity exchanges. A number of high-profile investors have recently shown up here. KKR & Co., the New York-based private-equity firm, last summer bought control of a rose farm, Afriflora, for about $200...

Writing for The Federalist blog last week, American Energy Alliance Vice President of Strategic Initiatives Dan Ziegler remarked: The environment isn’t getting worse—it’s rapidly improving, even as our economy grows and our energy use increases. The EPA recently released new data on air quality showing that total emissions of the six major air pollutants have dropped by 68 percent since 1970. This is all the more impressive considering that during this same period, America’s population has grown by 54 percent,...

Last week, Indiana Governor Mike Pence (R) signed his state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Social media went a bit, well, bonkers. Hillary Clinton tweeted, “Sad this new Indiana law can happen in America today. We shouldn’t discriminate against ppl bc of who they love #LGBT.” The CEO of SalesForce, headquartered in Indiana, says they will pull out. Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, has called religious freedom laws “dangerous” and likens them to Jim Crow laws. What’s all of...

There is something about Indiana’s new religious freedom protection law that is causing otherwise reasonable people to lose their minds. As Elise Hilton pointed out earlier today, everyone from presumptive presidential candidates (Hillary Clinton) to corporate CEOS (Apple’s Tim Cook) to your ill-informedfriends on social media have been claiming the law allows discrimination against homosexuals. It does not. (In most parts of the country, discrimination based on sexual orientation is legal—and always has been.) Elise produced a helpful explainer with...

Small-government conservatives often share a regrettable trait with their big-government liberal opponents: they frame the issue almost exclusively in terms of the size and scope of the federal government. Although conservatives sometimes expand their view and include state governments, the focus tends to miss the local governments, city and county municipalities, that can have a considerable impact on an individual’s life. But in Texas they’re beginning to take notice—and are doing something about it: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican,...

Abdel-Latif DerianJoe Carter put up a very good clarifying post on Wednesday about Western politicians and religious leaders envisioning a moderate Islam that might follow the template of the Protestant Reformation. In “Let’s Stop Asking Islam to Be Christian,” Carter wrote that what Western elites really want is for Muslims “to be like liberal mainline Christianity: all the trappings of the faith without all that pesky doctrine that might stir up trouble.” Indeed, Christians and Muslims hold radically different notions...

On Friday Afternoon, Acton’s Director of Research Samuel Gregg joined hostSheila Liaugminas on Relevant Radio’sA Closer Look to discuss his recent article at the Public Discourse entitledGod, Reason, and Our Civilizational Crisis. They discuss how differences between how societies view the divine will often cause tension and conflict between, and even within, cultures. The full interview is available via the audio player below. ...

It is not often that women of the American Revolutionary War era are described as “formidable” and “intellectual,” but Mercy Otis Warren is such a woman. Born to wealthy Cape Cod family in 1728, Warren received no formal education but was tutored by her uncle. In 1754, she married James Warren, who became a Massachusetts state senator. It was the murder of her brother at the hands of colonial revenue officers that drove Warren to political writings and action. Combining...

President Cristina Kirchner and Oliver Stone (Wikimedia Commons/Presidencia de la Nación Argentina) Earlier this month, Acton and Instituto Acton Argentina hosted a daylong conference exploring the relationship between religious and economic freedom. Scholars from around the world, including Acton’s director of research Samuel Gregg, traveled to Buenos Aires, Argentina to discuss the ways in which Christianity has contributed to building the foundations of freedom. In a new article for the American Spectator, Gregg discusses some issues he observed while visiting...

When es to spending on national defensethe political debate is oftenpresented as a simplistic, binary contest between those who want to spend more and more (often conservatives, who want a strong military) and those who want to spend less and less (often liberals, who want to use the money for social welfare purposes).While those discussions are important, they are also plete. Conservatives, inparticular, should be more cognizant of the way cronyism can undercut military readiness. In an article today atThe...