$1 Billion That Nobody Wants

Politicians in Washington hardly let a few minutes go by without mentioning how broke the government is. So, it’s a little surprising that they’ve created a stash of more than $1 billion that almost no one wants. Unused one-dollar coins havse been quietly piling up in Federal Reserve vaults in breathtaking numbers, thanks to a [...]

The Child Cases: Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Her name was Isis Charm Vas and at 6 months old she was a slight child – fifth percentile in height and weight. When the ambulance sped her to Northwest Texas Hospital in Amarillo on a Saturday morning in October 2000, doctors and nurses feared that someone had done something awful to her. A constellation [...]

Human Rights Defender Now Fights For U.S. Policy

As a young teacher fighting all the way to the Supreme Court for Haitian refugees, and later, as the dean of Yale Law School, Harold Koh became one of the country’s most prominent defenders of human rights. But as the top lawyer at the Obama State Department, Koh has been defending a lot of things [...]

Rod Blagojevich’s Tongue Finally Meets Its Match – 17 Federal Convictions

Rod Blagojevich’s seemingly irrepressible tongue finally met its match — convictions on 17 of 20 federal corruption counts. Until Monday, there seemed to be very little that was capable of quieting the voluble former Illinois governor whose powers of self-justification were remarkable, even for a politician. After his December 2008 arrest, at a time when [...]

Workers Satisficing Careers By Cobbling Jobs Together

It can be tough finding a regular job in the tough economy that many Americans are enduring. To earn a living, some folks are working multiple part-time jobs — as many as six or eight of them. The New York Times profiled some of those workers Sunday. For instance, there was Louise Gassman, 28, who [...]

Study: Doctors More Likely To Drop Private Insurance Than Medicare

There’s a lot of chatter about how public policy can influence doctors’ decisions about which new patients to see and which to turn away. One big question: Does the squeeze on Medicare that has limited the program’s pay increases to doctors lead them to see fewer of those patients? Some researchers decided to look at [...]

Josh Ritter: First A Songwriter, Now A Novelist

The singer-songwriter Josh Ritter has been compared to Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen. In the last decade, Ritter has released five albums of literate, folk-based rock that often combine fantastical imagery with sincere emotion: his 2006 album The Animal Years paired wartime stories with biblical imagery, while the gothic sounds of last year’s So Runs [...]

Happily Ever After: Reimagining Diana’s ‘Story’

The publication of Monica Ali’s third novel, Untold Story, which imagines a counterfactual future for Princess Diana in which she doesn’t actually die in 1997 but instead flees to an undercover life in midwestern America, created something of an uproar in England this winter. Critics questioned the tastefulness of writing about the late Princess of [...]

Shuttle Memories: Submit Your Photos

With the final mission of NASA’s Space Shuttle Program scheduled to blast off with the July 8 launch of space shuttle Atlantis, we thought it might be nice to collect and share some of your personal memories about the program. Do you remember how you felt watching your very first launch? Did attending shuttle launches [...]

Libyan Rebels Celebrate Gadhafi Arrest Warrant

Moammar Gadhafi’s government angrily denounced an international arrest warrant for the Libyan leader, while Libyans opposed to his rule danced and celebrated in the streets Monday. The International Crimian Court, which is based in The Hague, has no means of arresting Gadhafi, and the Libyan government says the court has no legal standing in Libya. [...]