In recent weeks, police officers in New Haven, Connecticut, have been given a new rule to follow on the beat. In dangerous situations, they must not only use deadly force as a last resort but also “employ de-escalation and mitigation techniques to th

During a hearing on her nomination to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Jennifer Sung hit a speed bump. Republican Sen. John Kennedy from Louisiana, one of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s more acerbic questioners, had taken issue with a letter

Adi Itin is a high school senior whose days are packed not just with schoolwork and babysitting, but assessments and tryouts for what position she’ll have in the Israeli army when she’s drafted this summer. She’s been tested for her readiness for pil

As director of polling at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, John Della Volpe has been talking to America’s young people for over 20 years. In “Fight: How Gen Z Is Channeling Their Fear and Passion to Save America,” he brings some of tho

With a resurgence of COVID-19, virtual schooling has returned to many parts of the United States. Along with it are renewed worries over what educators call learning loss and a need to fix it. The full damage from enforced online schooling is yet to

Donald Trump’s victory in Alaska in 2020 extended a half-century run for Republican presidential nominees in that state. But at the same time, Alaska’s voters also approved a ballot measure that is now complicating the defeated president’s revenge ca

President Joe Biden pledged an “America is back” foreign policy that would get the United States out of forever wars, renew U.S. moral authority through closer relations with allies and support for democracy, and revive economic leadership. In many w

Laura Quinteros, a seventh grade teacher at a private school, noticed something missing from her class reading list: Salvadoran literature. So she added “Fireflies in El Mozote,” a first-person account of a 1981 massacre when soldiers killed nearly 1

The Supreme Court on Thursday prevented the Biden administration from enforcing its mandate that employees of large firms must be vaccinated against COVID-19 or regularly test for the virus. The move effectively ends the government’s most ambitious a

It might be hard to find a former coal industry executive fighting for tough climate laws. The same holds true for former bosses in the alcohol and tobacco industries who regret making money off those vices and want to make amends. Not so in the gamb

The 24th Winter Olympics are only three weeks away, but the focus is not on skiing or snowboarding. It’s been on sportswashing. That’s the term human rights advocates use to criticize the mutual embrace uniting international sport and authoritarian s

Usually when Cameroon is in the news, it is for something negative. The Central African country is one of the poorest and most corrupt. The Islamist militant group Boko Haram has displaced hundreds of thousands over the last decade. A low-level civil

For all the promise of making cellular service faster and more reliable, 5G – fifth generation – networks have been repeatedly tangled and delayed over issues with the airwaves on which the technology relies. The latest controversy, postponing a Jan.

In the fight against the world’s authoritarians, U.S. President Joe Biden wants help from democratic allies. But not all those allies are fully on board with his vision. A recent poll asked voters in 20 democracies to choose between forming alliances

For Iranians overwhelmed by economic, health, and political hardships, the historical irony on display at the sprawling Behesht-e Zahra (Zahra’s Paradise) cemetery, Tehran’s largest, could not be more acute. It was there that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khome

Five months after the Taliban took over Afghanistan, the country has become the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. About half of its 40 million people are hungry, with dire forecasts for the winter. In response, both the United States and United Nati

Despite a second straight year of rising homicides in 2021, last year’s violent crime data show some reasons for hope.  First, even though the homicide rate rose again, it slowed down. For 2020, it posted a 30% year-on-year increase, according to res

Millions of Americans experienced the power of poetry when Amanda Gorman presented “The Hill We Climb” at the presidential inauguration of Joe Biden last January. Gorman, the youngest inaugural poet, acknowledged that America is “far from polished, f

Tan Chunmiao left his rural hometown in the mountains in 2011 for a factory job in the booming Pearl River megacity of Guangzhou. Ten years later, Mr. Tan is still there, now putting in long hours as a chef in a Japanese restaurant to support his wif

Not long after the end of World War I, American Sylvia Beach opened an English-language bookstore and lending library in Paris. “The Paris Bookseller,” Kerri Maher’s historical novel based on Beach’s remarkable life, imagines her impromptu speech to