Last week, both houses of Congress approved a bill — the Military Commissions Act — that would permit the indefinite, extrajudicial incarceration of terrorist suspects and their interrogation using torture in all but name...
It was 230 years ago that Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, a work conceived, as he put it, "amidst the ruins of the Capitol" in Rome...
Shortly after Hungary set off the fall of Soviet-style socialism in 1989, when that country's rulers allowed visitors from what then was East Germany to leave for West Germany without any hindrance, my mother, who had lived in Hungary all her life before being allowed to leave in 1975, made some interesting predictions...
At the end of August each year, many leading European scholars, businesspeople, policymakers and even some graduate students come to the small Austrian village of Alpbach, arguably one of the most scenic on the planet, to discuss the state and future of the world economy and what should be done...
One of the bitter ironies of the 20th century was that communism, which began as an egalitarian doctrine accusing capitalism of selfishness and calloused sacrifices of others, became in power a system whose selfishness and callousness toward others made the sins of capitalism pale...
