Three days before the congressional elections last fall, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood halfway around the world, pledging to young victims of human trafficking at Cambodia's s Siem Reap Center that they would continue to enjoy the support of the U.S. State Department, which then provided some $336,000 to the shelter. The acclaimed center, situated near the magnificent temples of Angkor Wat, was an oasis of peace for some 50 survivors who, before they were rescued or escaped, ...

THE Supreme Court had forbidden it, but they prayed defiantly in a school in Netcong, N.J., reading the morning invocation from the Congressional Record. In the state legislatures, they introduced more than 100 Draconian bills to put down campus dissent. In West Virginia, they passed a law absolving police in advance of guilt in any riot deaths. In Minneapolis they elected a police detective to be mayor. Everywhere, they flew the colors of assertive patriotism. Their car windows were plastered ...

California doesn't want its children to kill Zombies. Or prostitutes, police officers, terrorists--basically anyone who might be deemed, in the video-game world, a bad guy. The U.S. Supreme Court announced on April 26 that it would rule on the constitutionality of a California law passed in 2005 that seeks to bar the sale of violent video games to minors. It defines violence as anything depicting the "killing, maiming, dismembering or sexual assaulting" of a human image. While this will ...

Correction Appended: Feb. 5, 2010 Secretary of Defense Robert Gates flies around the world to war zones and allies, to China and Russia and Suriname, on a Cold War relic called the Doomsday Plane. Forged in the 1970s by Boeing, it was designed to stay aloft even in the midst of nuclear war. It's an airborne Pentagon. The plane is so heavy that it needs refueling in midair on long flights. The Air Force crew aboard told me ...

In Washington on Monday, Hillary Clinton unveiled the State Department's 10th annual report on modern-day slavery, which evaluates the efforts of every nation to combat the crime. For the first time, State ranked the antislavery efforts of the U.S. alongside those of 174 other countries. The U.S. rated itself as being in full compliance with the Trafficking Victims Protection Act . But the report appears to have ignored a new congressional mandate to identify specific cases of ...

Even if the television tube and a ubiquitous Texan had yet to be conceived, the President of the U.S. in the latter third of the 20th century would almost certainly be the world's most exhaustively scrutinized, analyzed and criticized figure. As it is, the power of his office and the Jovian electronic eye ensure that the Chief Executive's visage and voice are available for instant dissection from Baghdad to Bangkok, from factory cafeteria to family living room. Depending on ...

I'm not really a size 4. I know this because I was hardly a size 4 back when I was 15 and physically fit, and I'm neither of those now. But clothing stores know their customers, so they flatter us, supersizing their sizes until a 4 is as big as an 8 used to be, and we can all sleep better at night, confident that we're slimmer than we were in high school. This is pretty much how our ...

We are all Keynesians now. It's a phrase that entered public discourse as the headline of a TIME cover story in 1965. Now it's coming back into fashion. This does not signify that we are all--as was Englishman John Maynard Keynes--Cambridge University economists with lucrative side jobs as investment managers, spectacular art collections, lots of famous friends and Russian-ballerina wives. At least I don't fit that description. Do you? The resurgence of interest in Keynes also doesn't represent a full ...

The congressional investigation of Communists turned last week from a story of espionage to a story of Communists in high places in Government. The course was changed by the testimony of a soft-voiced ex-Communist, who sat down before the House Un-American Activities Committee and calmly told a tale of high powered plotting in New Deal days.He was Whittaker Chambers, 47, for 13 years a member and "paid functionary" of the Communist Party, a strong anti-Communist since 1937. In 1939, two years after his break from Communism, ...

Joe Walsh didn't go to Washington to make friends. "I came here ready to go to war," says Walsh, a Republican freshman from Chicago's suburbs. "The political powers will always try to get you to compromise your beliefs for the good of the team," he says, sitting in his congressional office near a quilt inscribed with the Constitution's preamble and the leather sofa that doubles as his bed. "The people didn't send me here to compromise." Humility was ...