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New York City was slated to reopen public schools on Monday, but that’s now on hold due to Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 11th-hour decision to delay.

“We are doing this to make sure that all the standards we’ve set can be achieved,” he said during a news conference on Thursday, according to The New York Times.

The new plan is for pre-K students to return to school next week, with everyone else waiting until later in September or early October. For now, the school year will begin virtually for K–12.

No plan is set in stone, of course. Government officials, under constant pressure to satisfy teachers unions that have threatened to strike unless their demands for greater caution are met, can always decide to keep kids at home even longer—no matter how inconvenient and frustrating for parents.

If de Blasio is sorry for making life tougher for working-class parents—many of whom rely on public school’s day care function—he isn’t saying so. The mayor specifically declined to apologize during his news conference. Many parents, as well as principals and teachers, were blindsided by the last-minute decision.

Principal “I’m embarrassed by the city’s response to this. We have been crying for the last half hour…if you have friends who you can form pods with…DO IT…Ineffective, inadequate leadership has made a mess of all of this.” @NY1

— Amanda Farinacci (@amandafarinacci) September 17, 2020

Note that for all the concern about being able to reopen safely, New York City arguably has a better handle on COVID-19 than any other major city in the U.S. The early days of the pandemic were obviously a disaster for New York, but the situation has improved dramatically since June.

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The new Middle Eastern accord quite literally reaches for the stars. As part of the deal, inked earlier this week, Israel and United Arab Emirates have committed to cooperate in space exploration.

The Abraham Accords, signed September 15, formally normalized Israel’s relationship with both Bahrain and United Arab Emirates. While geopolitical concerns have dominated both the substance of the accords and media coverage of the deal, the signatories also pledged a “common interest in establishing and developing mutually beneficial cooperation in the field of exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes,” which may include “joint programs, projects, and activities.”

Both Israel and the United Arab Emirates have thriving space programs. The Israeli Space Agency, founded in 1982, has launched a number of satellites—most notably, in 2019, the Beresheet Lander to the moon. Co-designed and built by the Israeli companies SpaceIL and Israeli Aerospace Industries, Beresheet was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and made it all the way to the Moon for less than $100 million dollars.

Unfortunately, the Beresheet lander crashed into the lunar surface due to a mechanical error. Still, the fact that the Israeli Space Agency was able to get that close is significant. The only other nations who have been able to get that close to the lunar surface are the Americans, the Chinese, and the Russians.

The Emirati space program is significant too. Currently rocketing its way from Earth to Mars is the Al-Amal (Arabic for “Hope”) satellite, which launched in July. It is expected to arrive in February, when it will begin to investigate Martian weather patterns.

It is too soon to know how the accord will affect the two space programs. But on August 17, before the Abraham Accords were signed, Israeli Minister of Science and Technology Izhar Shay said that cooperation was “imminent” and that “[t]he infrastructure is there for the commercial engagements for the sharing of know-how and mutual efforts.” Among the possibilities: Israeli lander technology and the the Emirates’ Mars shot could combine to lead to a landing on the Red Planet; Emirati and Israeli astronauts join the U.S. on an Artemis moon mission; the two nations could launch a joint mission to explore the dwarf planet Ceres.

Clearly, space exploration is no longer the exclusive realm of the world’s superpowers. And whatever libertarian objections one might have to spending public dollars on space, scientific cooperation is certainly preferable to political rivalry. The Earth is about 42 million miles from Mars. Our human disputes may look a little less significant from out there.

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Tiana Lowe at the Washington Examiner reports:

The Department of Education has informed Princeton University that it is under investigation following the school president’s declaration that racism was “embedded” in the institution.

President Christopher L. Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

According to a letter the Department of Education sent to Princeton that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, such an admission from Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” . . . .

“Based on its admitted racism, the U.S. Department of Education (“Department”) is concerned Princeton’s nondiscrimination and equal opportunity assurances in its Program Participation Agreements from at least 2013 to the present may have been false,” the letter reads. “The Department is further concerned Princeton perhaps knew, or should have known, these assurances were false at the time they were made. Finally, the Department is further concerned Princeton’s many nondiscrimination and equal opportunity claims to students, parents, and consumers in the market for education certificates may have been false, misleading, and actionable substantial misrepresentations in violation of 20 U.S.C. § 1094(c)(3)(B) and 34 CFR 668.71(c). Therefore, the Department’s Office of Postsecondary Education, in consultation with the Department’s Office of the General Counsel, is opening this investigation.”

Readers may recall that in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases (Gratz and Grutter), some briefs filed in defense of the university’s use of race in admissions argued that such use of race should be permissible to ameliorate the effects of the university’s own prior racial discrimination. The University of Michigan did not embrace these arguments, however, and the above report helps explain why. Even assuming it was the case that there had been racial discrimination at the University of Michigan, had the university made any such admission to justify its use of race in admissions, it could have opened itself up to liability and prompted a federal inquiry, much like the one Princeton has to deal with now.

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In January, in Duquesne University of the Holy Spirit v. NLRB, a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit concluded that Dusquesne’s “religious mission places it beyond” the NLRB’s jurisdiction, and therefore the Board could not order Dusquesne bargain with a union representing the school’s adjunct faculty. Judge Griffith wrote the opinion for the court, joined by Judge Rogers. Judge Pillard dissented.

Today, the D.C. Circuit denied a petition by union intervenors seeking rehearing en banc of the decision. Interestingly enough, although Judge Pillard dissented from the original panel decision, neither Judge Pillard nor any other judge on the court sought en banc review. Today’s order notes “the absence of a request by any member of the court for a vote.”

In a separate opinion concurring in the denial of rehearing en banc, Judge Pillard explains that she adheres to the belief that the panel decision was wrong, but does not believe that this case is the proper vehicle for cleaning up the D.C. Circuit’s confused precedent on the extent to which the NLRB has jurisdiction over labor disputes at religious universities. Insofar as the Dusquesne decision builds upon prior D.C. Circuit decisions that no party asked the court to review, this case “en banc review is not now the right vehicle to correct our wrong turn.”

Earlier this week, I noted another case of judges finding a decision wrong but not en banc worthy.

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