As national security scholar Gregory F. Treverton says, the brief mutiny mounted by Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, may be over, but the dramatic events sparked by that mutiny are “still unfolding.” In this interview with The Conversation U.S. democracy editor Naomi Schalit, Treverton, a former chairman of the National Intelligence Council in the Obama administration, points out that the U.S. response to the incident was superficially simple – essentially “We have nothing to do with this” – but fundamentally more complex.

The U.S. Supreme Court’s rulings on Thursday that race-conscious college admissions programs are unlawful was widely expected but still deeply discouraging.

Does a Colorado designer’s belief that marriage is between one man and one woman merit an exemption to state law barring discrimination against LGBTQ+ people? On June 30, 2023, the Supreme Court decided 6-3 that the answer is yes: Requiring a conservative Christian business owner to create wedding websites for gay couples would violate the free speech clause of the First Amendment.

It’s an article of faith among members of the Nevada education establishment that more taxpayer support is the key to lifting the state’s public schools out of an academic morass. This belief is the driving force for the $2 billion in new education spending that lawmakers approved last month. It was the impetus for the two largest tax hikes in state history, each enacted within the past two decades.

In addition to being the revolutionaries who demanded independence from Great Britain and the visionaries who drafted the Constitution, many of America’s Founding Fathers were journalists. Some owned and published newspapers, others wrote for them, but all understood the value of a free press to a fledgling democratic republic.

New data from an experimental drug being developed by Eli Lilly &Co. raises an intriguing question about obesity treatments: How low can the weight loss go?

The short-lived rebellion by Yevgeny Prigozhin, leader of the mercenary Wagner Group, did not yet jettison the Kremlin’s military leadership. But it may have had a more profound domestic and geopolitical impact: piercing the aura of invincibility so carefully cultivated by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Supreme Court has spoken, invalidating racial preferences in college admissions as was widely anticipated. The six-justice conservative majority deemed the boost that universities give some applicants purely on the basis of their ethnicity or skin color incompatible with the U.S. Constitution’s promise of equal protection under the laws.

If there’s anything I love, it’s nostalgia. Records, physical copies of old books, film cameras, ’90s cartoons and recapturing an old feeling.

An international team of astronomers has detected a faint signal of gravitational waves reverberating through the universe. By using dead stars as a giant network of gravitational wave detectors, the collaboration – called NANOGrav – was able to measure a low-frequency hum from a chorus of ripples of spacetime.

The Supreme Court has struck down the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness plan. In Biden v. Nebraska, the court ruled 6-3 on June 30, 2023, that the secretary of education does not have the authority to forgive US$430 billion of student loans under the Health and Economic Recovery Omnibus Emergency Solutions Act.

With Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court decision in Moore v. Harper, the reckless, anti-democratic arrogance of North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders finally hit a wall.

Submerged in the sadness for the loss of five people aboard the Titan submersible, and the criticism of the risky and poorly certified expedition to the wreck of the Titanic, was an extraordinary international rescue effort.

He’ll sit bolt upright at the first blast, his eyes wide with fright. As the barrage intensifies, he’ll cower under the table or in the far corner of the kitchen. Wherever I go in the house, he’ll be at my feet, trembling.

It’s been a year since the landmark Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision was handed down by the Supreme Court on June 24, 2022, upending a nearly 50-year constitutional precedent set by Roe v. Wade that recognized a constitutional right to abortion, one that was reaffirmed by Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey in 1992.

The new job requirement that takes up much time in higher education has little to do with grading papers or crafting lectures. It’s trying to keep our students academically buoyant and completing our courses amid a growing mental health epidemic. Many well-meaning educators (me included) are merely applying Band-Aids to the problem by allowing students to hand in assignments at semester’s end, looking the other way at disturbing attendance rates and helping them across the finish line, sometimes with limited proficiency. (This doesn’t even speak to the growing numbers of students who stop attending classes and don’t return concerned instructors’ emails.)

The new job requirement that takes up much time in higher education has little to do with grading papers or crafting lectures. It’s trying to keep our students academically buoyant and completing our courses amid a growing mental health epidemic. Many well-meaning educators (me included) are merely applying Band-Aids to the problem by allowing students to hand in assignments at semester’s end, looking the other way at disturbing attendance rates and helping them across the finish line, sometimes with limited proficiency. (This doesn’t even speak to the growing numbers of students who stop attending classes and don’t return concerned instructors’ emails.)

A bipartisan House of Commons committee recently found that former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had deliberately misled lawmakers about his staff’s repeated violations of lockdown rules that had been imposed during the peak of the COVID-19 crisis. The committee’s report makes for grim reading. But it also may mark a crucial first step toward restoring Britain’s tarnished democracy.