A Supreme Court case may veer into Native American sovereignty and state control over people and resources. Fundamentally, it’s about different perceptions of justice, and finding common ground.

When it comes to conditions inside prisons, should prisoners have a voice? That's one of the questions raised by a three-week strike by inmates in more than a dozen states.

The details have not been announced. But the thrust of the Trump Administration’s Middle East plan to secure Israeli-Palestinian peace seems clear: Rewrite the diplomatic rulebook. That has meant targeting major Palestinian demands: sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the “right of return.” The US president says he seeks to take those issues “off the table.” And broadly, by moving from superpower mediator to dictating negotiating terms, the administration aims to remove the Palestinians’ effective veto power on a peace deal. It seeks support from Arab oil states like Saudi Arabia to ramp up pressure on the Palestinians and to help fill the funding void left by its abandonment of UNRWA, the UN agency overseeing social services for the descendants of the 1948 refugees. Since the Gulf Arab states’ main preoccupation now is Iran – on which they see eye-to-eye with President Trump and Israel – the timing would seem propitious. The Palestinian leadership has rarely been weaker. Still, that doesn’t mean the new US approach will necessarily bring peace closer. The power of the narrative of exile-and-return from 1948 remains strong in the Arab world.

The symbols we choose to represent ourselves are always laden with meaning. But when a symbol we legitimately see as virtuous is fairly viewed by everyone else as villainous, should we make a change?

Globally, some 14 percent of people lack access to electricity. Electrifying entire nations can be difficult where infrastructure is lacking. In Uganda, rural residents are making their own light, thanks to solar power.

On Monday, China’s wealthiest individual, Jack Ma of tech giant Alibaba, announced his successor at the company he founded 19 years ago. Notably, in a country where 70 to 80 percent of private enterprises are still family run, Mr. Ma did not name a family member. Rather, one of the world’s biggest e-commerce companies will be led by Daniel Zhang, an 11-year Alibaba veteran chosen only for his “professional talent.”

The history of many countries can be marked by a transition away from a reliance on hereditary succession in both business and politics, or the belief that traits of leadership flow through bloodlines and family pedigree. Ma is a true innovator in many ways, most famously for building an innovative online shopping market worth more than the economies of most countries. But his legacy may lie in showing how China as well as much of Asia can produce founders of successful organizations not inclined to pass the reins of power to relatives.

“Alibaba was never about Jack Ma,” he stated in announcing his succession plan.

Instead, the former schoolteacher who came from humble origins is stepping back from day-to-day operations because he has built a corporate culture based on innovation, transparency, and accountability. “For the last 10 years, we kept working on these ingredients,” he stated.

The company’s future will depend on developing “droves of talent,” he said. And in a society with a long tradition of suspicion toward those outside the family circle, Ma has built an “architecture of trust” with customers, who number over half a billion. Chinese now readily rely on Alibaba’s online payment system, its ratings of products and services, and other trust-building mechanisms pioneered by the company.

Ma’s success reflects the first wave of entrepreneurs set free in 1992 when Communist Party patriarch Deng Xiaoping opened China for business. Ma also represents a trend away from family-run firms in many Chinese societies such as Taiwan and Singapore. Joseph Fan of the Chinese University of Hong Kong has found such companies lose 60 percent of their value on average when a founder hands the baton to a son or daughter.

China’s rapid growth now produces a new billionaire almost every day. Many of them, like Ma, have rejected nepotistic privilege in favor of systems based on merit and integrity. They swim in a talent pool, not a gene pool. As many countries have discovered as they progress, it is better to share a kinship of qualities than to rely solely on one’s progeny in business.