Same-sex marriage wins a breakthrough vote in France, but David Cameron is having trouble with his party over the same change in Britain.
Category: Political issues
Obama and Senate compete on immigration reform
A bipartisan Senate group comes out with a bold plan for US immigration reform, pre-empting the president's own proposals. But can either of them overcome the Republican rhetoric of "border protection"?
A theological view of nuclear weapons
Iran stresses the importance of Ayatollah Khamenei's fatwa against nuclear weapons. Should we take him seriously?
Debt ceiling crisis over, for a while
Congressional Republicans give in and vote to suspend America's debt ceiling for three months. So where's the next crisis?
Progressive? liberal? socialist? Where is Obama coming from?
Obama's second inaugural seems to have reinforced the narrative that he's a believer in big government. Here's why we should be sceptical about that.
Austria votes to keep conscription
Austrians voted yesterday to retain military conscription, in a victory for the centre-right ahead of this year's general election. But that's very much going against the trend in Europe. It's also something of a reversal of the usual position.
Torture goes to the movies
A film about the hunt for bin Laden puts torture in the spotlight. Will America face up to what Bush and Cheney did?
One person’s discrimination, another person’s freedom
Christians claiming relief from discrimination won one case out of four at the European Court of Human Rights. But in Australia, the issue is their right to discriminate against others.
Is Obama a realist?
Chuck Hagel's nomination brings back into focus the old debate between realists and idealists over American foreign policy.
James Buchanan RIP
Nobel-winning economist James Buchanan, one of the founders of public choice theory, died yesterday at the age of 93. As with most pioneers, it's a measure of his success that we no longer realise how controversial his ideas once were.
The World is Not Enough 