Jia Gottlieb, a family practitioner who offers acupuncture and breathing exercises along with traditional medicine, said, "When I get parents who don't vaccinate, I tell them, 'When your boy gets a vaccination he takes on a risk for the public good, just like the firemen [at the World Trade Center] who went back into the buildings.'" But Gottlieb's words usually fall on deaf ears. "These are probably people who donate a lot of money to good causes," he said, "but their view is 'I'm going to let everyone else's child take a risk but not my own.' That's not avant-garde. That's not enlightened. It's pretty primitive."

Calling the sign discriminatory is more than simply legally suspect; it trivializes real discrimination, which is unfortunately rampant in Philadelphia.

Too often, a black man has a tougher time finding a job, a gay couple is told that an apartment is no longer for sale, a Hispanic woman gets fired without explanation.

These are cases of real discrimination. They're the cases which the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, as their mission statement dictates, should be exposing, pursuing and rectifying. 

In his plays and movies, Perry shows African Americans as they . . . well, I was about to say he shows us as we really are, but that's not true. Reality is for documentaries; Perry's characters are unsubtle, his humor is broad, and his plots are soaked with melodrama. Among his big themes are love, fidelity and the importance of family, and his movies usually have religious overtones.

What Perry does is depict black Americans as people relating to other people -- not as mere plot devices and not as characters defined solely by how they relate to the white world. The rest of the movie industry would do well to take note.

Not surprisingly, Liechtenstein’s leaders have focused all of their indignation on the theft of confidential data. “Fiscal interests cannot be placed ahead of the rule of law,” fumed Prince Alois. We are not encouraging anyone to steal data. But who is putting fiscal interests ahead of the rule of law here? That’s what providing a secret haven for other countries’ tax evaders is, and Germany is right to crack down.

Liechtenstein and its fellow havens need to start showing some real cooperation in fighting fraud, money laundering and tax evasion. In the modern world, that is how countries, and leaders, earn respect and influence.