The face-off at the security gate outside the Western Wall one Friday this month was familiar: for more than two decades, women have been making a monthly pilgrimage to pray at one of Judaism’s holiest sites in a manner traditionally preserved for men, and the police have stopped them in the name of maintaining public order.

But after a flurry of arrests this fall that set off an international outcry, the women arrived for December’s service to find a new protocol ordered by the ultra-Orthodox rabbi who controls the site. To prevent the women from defying a Supreme Court ruling that bars them from wearing ritual garments at the wall, they were blocked by police officers from bringing them in.

“How can you say this to me?” demanded a tearful Bonna Devora Haberman, 52, a Canadian immigrant who helped found the group Women of the Wall in 1988. “I’m a Jew. This is my state.”...

Over the last two years, the streaming service Netflix has signaled its willingness to jump into producing original scripted series while also resurrecting “Arrested Development” for another season in 2013. However, Netflix may not have the spotlight to itself for much longer. Amazon.com’s production arm, Amazon Studios has announced that it has given greenlights to six comedy projects which will be available free of charge to Amazon Prime members upon completion. Viewer response to the various projects will determine which shows actually go to series.

Among the six pilots are Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau’s “Alpha House;” which will follow four senators who rent a house together in Washington...

Dave Checketts is not a professionally trained clergyman. The former chairman of Madison Square Garden and the New York Knicks is currently CEO of Legends Hospitality, the concessions and merchandise company he jointly owns with the New York Yankees and Dallas Cowboys.

But he's also a lay minister for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints with oversight of 10 Mormon congregations in Fairfield County, Conn., including the one in Newtown.

On Friday morning, Checketts had left his New Canaan, Conn., home and headed to his Park Avenue office to prepare for a weekend business trip to Dallas for Sunday's Cowboys-Steelers game. He and Cowboys owner Jerry Jones planned to host a group of new investors. But late morning he got an email about a shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary. From his laptop, he accessed the church records for Mormon families in Newtown. Five of them had children that attended the school...

Last night, 20,000 of us in the audience sat mesmerized, collectively holding our breath as Leonard Cohen, performing his Old Ideas World Tour 2012, sang "Bird on the Wire" at Madison Square Garden. Except for Cohen's low gravely voice, the Garden was so silent you could have heard a finger slide across an iPhone. He was the preacher, the stage was his altar and the venue was his cathedral. The backdrop was a wall of silk curtains which rose from the floor to the rafters and changed colors with each song. The sound system was so perfect you could hear each syllable and chord from everywhere in the Garden.

Like a bird on the wire
Like a drunk in a midnight choir
I have tried in my way to be free...

China has rounded up five hundred or so members of a fringe Christian group known as the Church of the Almighty God, which contends that the world will end on Friday. It had been distributing pamphlets and sending out cell-phone messages around the country warning, as one pamphlet put it: “December 21st is approaching, and on that day half of the world’s good people will die, and all evil people will die out—only if you join the Almighty God movement can you avoid death and be saved.” The group also predicts that “the sun will not shine and electricity will not work for three days,” according to the state press...

Last month, as I was driving down a backbreaking road between Goma, a provincial capital in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kibumba, a little market town about 20 miles away, I came upon the body of a Congolese soldier. He was on his back, half hidden in the bushes, his legs crumpled beneath him, his fly-covered face looking up at the sun. The strangest thing was, four years ago, almost to the day, I saw a corpse of a Congolese soldier in that exact same spot. He had been killed and left to rot just as his comrade would be four years later, in the vain attempt to stop a rebel force from marching down the road from Kibumba to Goma. The circumstances were nearly identical: a group of Tutsi-led rebels, widely believed to be backed by Rwanda, eviscerating a feckless, alcoholic government army that didn’t even bother to scoop up its dead...

With all the porn watching humanity has been doing, it's a wonder we ever do anything else.

The search engine PornWatchers.com (warning: if you go there, you will see porn) released a report that claims people have watched 1.2 million years worth of porn since 2006 — and that's based on data from just two porn sites...

In the wake of a horrific school shooting in Newtown, Conn., lawmakers and activists have come forward to demand a serious discussion about gun control in America. The National Rifle Association has been silent, while the president has said we have an “obligation” to try to prevent another massacre at the hands of a crazed gunman.

I woke up late Friday morning and posted my latest comic before realizing no one would be talking about it or any other issue that day except the latest massacre unfolding before our eyes – this time involving children. Not “this time.” I mean “again.” As I had done not one week earlier when there was a mass shooting a few miles from my home in Portland, I watched the real time updates, trying to wrap my mind around being a part of the human race.

CNN named Ryan Lanza as the suspect before noon based on a police source. Within minutes, journalists at several outlets were not only reporting the name, but passing around a link to Ryan’s Facebook account. And people I knew were suddenly telling me, dude, you are Facebook friends with the suspect...