Politics & Current Affairs

The now-prevalent pattern of flag-rank military officers going to work for defense contractors as soon as they retire is a form of corruption, says James Fallows at The Atlantic.

Despite what optimists within the White House may believe, the odds are not good that Obama will repeat 1996, when Bill Clinton made a startling political comeback.

There is a great deal to be learned from reading the work of Sunstein. He is a brilliant, intellectually honest legal thinker who understands the history of our 20th-century movement.

The presidential adviser penned Kennedy’s famous inaugural line: “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.”

Recently I have found myself in trouble twice for my choice of words. The first time was for calling sex workers “prostitutes,” and the second time was for calling prostitutes […]

James Cameron’s Avatar was the highest-grossing film of all time last year. This year it can boast a new accolade: it was the film illegally downloaded most often.

University of Notre Dame law professor John Copeland Nagle thinks it defies representative government for an outgoing Congress to pass legislation after an election.

Was it contradictory of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s lawyers to condemn the leaking of secret government documents pertaining to the rape charges against him?

A U.K. charity for the homeless tells people not to give money to beggars at Christmas. Thames Reach says seasonal generosity is spent on buying crack cocaine and heroin.

What are the implications of the U.S. Federal Court finding this week that Congress cannot force people to engage in a commercial activity, in this case buying an insurance policy?

Most people want to have children. Societies that don’t accommodate this aspiration run the risk of losing faith in their own future and compromising their economic development.

“Politics is like term papers,” says U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham. “You usually get serious right before the term paper is due. That’s the downside of democracy: without friction, there is […]

Can China continue to grow richer without wrecking the global environment? Will China’s carbon dioxide emissions overwhelm the world? China relies on coal for most of its energy.

Many countries felt shocked and cheated when FIFA chose Qatar to host the 2022 football World Cup. But it could usher in a new era for the sport and the region.

Afghans live in fear that the international community will abandon them. Although the Taliban is unpopular, normal Afghans are just trying to survive.

Shame on Sweden; shame on Interpol; shame on Britain. And lasting shame, given this farcical hijacking of a sex crime law that is scarcely ever enforced…, on the United States.

So I was a guest on the local Tea Party radio program yesterday.  I disagreed with the tea partisans about everything–mainly to provoke discussion but also because I’m not exactly their […]

Do you know what Nobel winner Liu Xiaobo stands for? The Chinese dissident has praised the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and said China should be fully westernized.

The world system is being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers.

Innovation is built into the American way of life, says former President Jimmy Carter. “Quite often, the people who do leave their own nation and come to an unknown destination, […]

The U.S. is anxious to broaden its influence in Central Asia—and limit that of Russia. The result, however, are questionable alliances with some of the strangest despots in the world.

The 21st century belongs to China. As the societies of Europe and the United States plateau, developing countries in Asia and South America are racing forward at an unprecedented pace—with […]

Honey traps, also called “honey pots,” have been a favorite spying tactic as long as sex and espionage have existed—in other words, forever.

If the world’s leading experts in politics, psychology and game theory were to design a problem to be as difficult as possible to solve, it would probably look a lot like climate change.

The new eugenic intention seems to be not only pro-life but pro-quality of every life. The choice will be for every person against nature’s randomness and indifference.

A series of infographics comparing the two countries puts their growing rivalry into perspective.

Ever since President Jimmy Carter normalized relations with China in 1977, the world’s most populous country has slowly expanded freedoms within its country and used “soft power”—influence through diplomatic, economic, […]

The political fetishisation of sending offenders to prison for longer periods has been a disaster in the U.K., The Independent says. “We have ended up warehousing petty criminals.”

After two years of Obama’s foreign policy pragmatism toward Latin America, are Republicans in Congress threatening to turn back the clock to Cold War times?

The “Just Say No” campaign in the late 1980s increased the severity of sentencing for drug offenders in the U.S. Since that time, particularly since the mid-1990’s, incarceration rates have […]