The South China Sea’s benign environment of the past has effectively been destroyed. In the past few months, it is clear that the tension has increased manyfold. If the temperature continues to rise, it could reach boiling point. It is possible that there will be armed conflict in the area as never before seen. After all, the territorial claimants have acted in such ways that other claimants can n

Mexican food and beer. That’s what retired Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor suggests might pull this fractured nation back together again. Those were the tools she used to reach consensus in the 1970s when she was a leader in the Arizona legislature.“I’ll tell you what I did,” she said last week at a conference in Washington, sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for Social Cohes

Several weeks into December last year, my parents suggested I might like a Kindle for Christmas.I was sitting in my room at school, and my eyes darted to the bookshelf on my left. From the silence on the line they could tell I wasn’t enthusiastic; I muttered something about not needing another gadget, mostly because I couldn’t find a way to shape my reluctance into words. The conversation was tact

In the waning minutes of last week’s Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney was opining about Afghanistan when he uttered something that, in past years, would have been condemned by virtually all Republicans as dovish blasphemy.He said: “I also think we’ve learned that our troops shouldn’t go off and try and fight a war of independence for another nation.”It’s rare to hear a Republican front-

It was the kind of insular, issue-driven, black-on-black debate that ordinarily doesn’t attract the media spotlight, even on the slowest news day. But thanks to the unprecedented profile of Barack Obama, the most famous black person in modern history, this one got hot.Last month, in an interview with Chris Hedges on Truthdig.com, Princeton professor Cornel West gave a scathing assessment of Obama’

“Roaring into space on two mighty blowtorches and a magnificent column of steam, the space shuttle Columbia was given a go-ahead Sunday to complete the 54-hour mission that is expected to open a new space frontier. The liftoff ― the world’s most spectacular space launch ― awed veteran space watchers at the Kennedy Space Center here.” ― Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1981.Thirty years ago, space shuttl

Thanks to modern technology, peering into private lives all around the world has never been easier.When Su Lin, the San Diego-born daughter of Chinese parents Bai Yun and Gao Gao, had her first medical exam, eager viewers proclaimed that she was the cutest baby ever. When a mother of three died in an airplane accident, leaving the father to care for the family alone, thousands of people across the

In large swaths of the nation, life expectancy has stopped increasing and even declined slightly over the decade that ended in 2007, particularly among women. This historic reversal of a long-time trend toward longer life expectancies in the world’s richest nation is virtually unique in the developed world and appears largely due to the growing inequality of American society.To be sure, this week’