At the famous Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, the conservative senator Stephen Douglas wielded racist sentiment like a katana. Lincoln was rather ambivalent toward the issue of slavery, only opposing it because of the instability of the slave system. Nevertheless, Douglas capitalized on the prejudices of the American public of the age, and went as far [...]

Watching the presidential debate tonight was both worrisome and relieving for me. I was glad to see many important issues addressed. I wasn’t so keen on how the issues were being handled.
First of all, I was pleased to see that the issue of Pakistan, so often neglected in presidential campaigns, came up. Pakistan-US relations are [...]

Australia is famous for a supposedly idyllic lifestyle, “mateship”, an opera house, funny accents, and kangaroos.
The country is also going through the worst drought in its recorded history.
Since 2003, the country has been completely parched. Rainfall has been at a record low—the last time Australia received so little rain was 108 years ago, during another [...]

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When the communists in Vietnam took over, there was widespread opposition and a pro-democracy movement. In defense of their own government, the government [...]

Just about a year ago, the Baltic state of Estonia went offline. Botnets, immense networks of hijacked computers, poured billions of hits onto Estonian government and commercial websites, and the Estonian servers, attempting to shoulder many times their normal load, gave up. Tensions were elevated-Estonians blamed the Russian government, who naturally denied involvement. For nearly [...]