The United States went to war in Iraq to destroy weapons of mass destruction and depose Saddam Hussein. No weapons have been found; Saddam is under arrest. The time has come to declare “mission accomplished” and announce a deadline for bringing the troops home. The administration has mad

The presidential campaign of 2004 promises to be the most expensive in U.S. history. Unfortunately, and not by accident, the most expensive presidential campaign in history also threatens to be the least enlightened. The enormous sums available to campaign organizations are for the most part investe

On May 17, 1954, neither the nine justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, nor anyone else, could have predicted that 50 years later both the U.S. secretary of state and the president’s national security advisor would be African-Americans. But on that Monday morning, the court announced its decisio

There is another killer disease besides AIDS, but it receives far less attention in the wealthy nations of the Northmalaria. Malaria has been almost completely eliminated in the United States and other developed countries. It is often included among the so-called neglected diseases, neglected in the

George W. Bush is a high-stakes gambler. When the going gets tough, he is inclined to up the ante. Whether it is tax cuts, the prescription drug benefit, bringing democracy to the Middle East or sending astronauts to Mars, he reaches for the sky. His endorsement of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharo

This year, the United Nations proclaimed April 7 an International Day of Remembrance. For in the 100 days beginning on the eve of that date 10 years ago, 800,000 people were killed in Rwanda. The divisions between the Tutsi and Hutu peoples in Rwanda were not always as deep as those that separated t

In Bach’s oratorio The Saint John Passion, a bass aria begins: “Eilt—Hurry, hurry you suffering souls.” In an urgent whisper, the chorus responds: “Wohin—where to?” The soloist replies, “Nach Golgotha—to Calvary.” That chorus represents the

For nearly a generation, conventional wisdom held that high-tech would be the wave of the future. Job seekers were advised to train in electrical engineering, software design and information technology. Now, as the jobless economic recovery sputters on, there are cries of alarm that high-tech jobs a

The United Nations has reported that the number of chronically hungry people worldwide is increasing at the rate of five million annually. But even here in the United States, richest of all nations, hunger and food insecurity (limited access to nutritionally adequate foods) have been steadily rising

Ninety years ago, a woman named Caroline Pratt started a school for a few children from Italian and Irish working-class families in the Greenwich Village section of Lower Manhattan. She took this step because she thought the neighborhood public schools were humdrum and ineffective. Her experiment wa