Foreign Policy

Just months after an enormous discovery of natural gas off the coast of Israel, a local company has reported another potentially big strike -- an estimated 1.4 billion barrels of oil, in addition to more natural gas. The company, Israel Opportunity Energy Resources, says it will start drilling by the end of the year. All of a sudden, Israel has found itself a focus of the world's hydrocarbon interest.

The massacre in al-Houla, where Syrian military forces and allied militiamen massacred more than 100 civilians in cold blood, leaves no doubt about the intentions of President Bashar al-Assad's regime: survival at any cost and through any means. Assad does not have a Plan B.

So far in 2012, ExxonMobil has made $104 million a day -- and that's an off year. In 2005, the oil giant earned a net profit of $36.1 billion, or "more money than any corporation had made in history," writes Steve Coll in his illuminating saga of the most successful and largest heir to John D. Rockefeller's strangling monopoly, Standard Oil. Simply put, ExxonMobil has been among the world's largest and most profitable companies since the 1950s, and it is so confident of its future that it recently raised the dividend paid to shareholders by a whopping 21 percent.

The "Shawshank Redemption" has nothing to do with China, but that hasn't kept social media censors from blocking the movie's title from searches on the country's most popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo.

Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others.

Perhaps it's the combined Twitter power of the Two Bills (Gates and Easterly), but working in development is hot, and not just for their 5.9 million followers. I'm not kidding: The website GradSchools.com lists 204 master's programs in international development, meant to prepare students for the glamorous life of managing technical assistance to water and sanitation departments in Bangladesh or dealing with the logistics of emergency food programs in Somalia.

It takes a strong stomach and a thick skin to be a female activist fighting online censorship in Pakistan. Sana Saleem has both.

The 24-year-old founder of a Karachi-based free expression group Bolo Bhi has been accused of supporting "blasphemy." On Twitter, a chilling message made the rounds last month: "this @sanasaleem is a prostitute who feature in porn movies #throwacidonsana." Her photo was posted in pornography forums.

Every news organization needs a social media strategy. Even China's government-controlled Xinhua News Agency now "tweets" news bulletins through Twitter-like microblogs called weibo -- through which more than 300 million users share details of their daily lives, jokes, gossip, and news.

America's longest running war -- the one against drugs -- came in for abuse this weekend at the Summit of the Americas. The abuse is deserved. Forty years of increasingly violent efforts to stamp out the drug trade haven't worked. And the blood and treasure lost is on a scale with America's more conventional wars. On the upside, we know that an approach based around treating drugs as a public health issue reaps benefits to both users and the rest of us.

Jim Yong Kim, selected  as the World Bank's new leader on Monday, has his work cut out for him. Sure, the bank has helped halve the poverty in the developing world over the past two decades -- part of the first Millennium Development Goals -- but progress in South Asia has dwarfed that in Africa, and 1 billion people will still live below the poverty line by 2015. And there's more bad news for Kim: The World Bank's narrow economic approach to poverty eradication simply will not work today, because the root causes of certain types of poverty are as structural as they are economic.