Where Did All the Republican Israel Critics Go?

Democrats are no longer as chummy with Israel as the GOP has become; big data’s on everybody’s mind these days; meanwhile, a Finnish columnist offers his perspective on the Ukraine and Russia conflict from a different vantage point. These discoveries and more below.

On a regular basis, Truthdig brings you the news items and odds and ends that have found their way to Larry Gross, director of the USC Annenberg School for Communication. A specialist in media and culture, art and communication, visual communication and media portrayals of minorities, Gross helped found the field of gay and lesbian studies.

Republicans and Democrats Are Reversing Roles on Israel You used to be able to find critics of Israel in the Republican Party.

Big Corporations are the Problem with Big Data Everybody’s going on about big data these days, from the Guardian’s Sustainable Business podcast to the Financial Times to AT&T.

Russia and Ukraine: A View from Finland Analyzing the Crimean crisis is not an easy task, particularly because the situation changes almost daily.

Jerusalem’s Water Crisis On March 4, the day Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu started off his speech at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington with a greeting from Jerusalem, “the eternal and undivided capital of Israel and the Jewish people,” the water was turned off in the homes of tens of thousands of families in the municipal area of the “undivided city.”

Ordinary Lives “Nobody’s listening!” (“Le pays, en un mot, ne se sent pas représenté,” or literally, “The country, in a word, feels that it is not listened to.”) Pierre Rosanvallon, a professor of history at the Collège de France in Paris, makes that statement the cornerstone of an ambitious project (of which more shortly) to counter the growing troubles—political, economic, spiritual—of France and, he has no doubt, the rest of the world. People feel abandoned, forgotten, not understood, excluded from the world of politics, institutions, the media—in a word, invisible.