This week the world's largest history organization is hosting a congressional briefing in Washington to share its findings from a two-year study that looked at, among other areas, the teaching methods of the country's educators.

It's not going to be pretty.

The American Historical Association is calling the report "the most comprehensive study...Read more

The proponents of Proposition 35, a November ballot initiative that would create a dedicated stream of funding to provide health care for California’s low-income residents, have assembled an impressive coalition: doctors, hospitals, community clinics, dentists, ambulance companies, several county governments, numerous advocacy groups, big ...Read more

As the election nears and tension builds between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris, many people may have forgotten that Joe Biden is still president until January.

In that limited time, he can still shape a lasting foreign policy legacy — one that I believe will be defined by the outcome of the war in Ukraine. How Biden approaches that conflict ...Read more

The state of South Carolina on Friday strapped down Freddie Owens and injected him with a chemical that’s usually used to euthanize pets. In the days before the execution, a key witness against him admitted testifying falsely at trial to save himself, and said Owens had nothing to do with the 1999 murder for which he was convicted. But that ...Read more

If you don’t live in the right-wing news bubble, you may have missed headlines about Venezuelan gangs taking over towns in Colorado and Texas, Haitians in Ohio eating geese and people’s pets, and immigrants overrunning Tunkhannock and Charleroi, right here in Pennsylvania.

To what should be no one’s surprise, these claims of nefarious ...Read more

Lies can be lethal.

One of the deadliest examples took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.

The false report of a young Black man trying to assault a white woman incited a mob that murdered as many as 300 Black residents, destroyed more than 1,200 homes, businesses and churches and left some 10,000 people homeless.

The youth was later ...Read more

If former President Donald Trump wins the November election, he says one of his actions on "Day One," right after he begins deporting millions of undocumented migrants, will be enacting a radical plan to force the federal bureaucracy to bow to his demands.

Like any president, Trump would undoubtedly stock the top levels of the government with ...Read more

Friday was a bad day for bad guys, as Hezbollah terrorists had two of its top gangsters offed in a targeted Israeli airstrike in Beirut that also took out more than a dozen other Hezbollah cutthroats. Now dead is Ibrahim Aqil, wanted for killing Americans. As U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said, “Any time a terrorist who has ...Read more

Over the last two decades, my mother has devoted herself to creating a small homestead farm in upstate New York. I’ve had a front-row seat to the tribulations and glories of raising a large flock of chickens, starting an orchard and cultivating an expansive vegetable garden.

Up with the sun, endlessly shoveling poop, endlessly weeding, ...Read more

Americans want a middle ground on abortion, and they rightly believe that medical decisions should be left to patients and their doctors, not the government. By approving Amendment 4, Florida voters can return that balanced medical and legal environment to the Sunshine State.

Amendment 4 states that “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or...Read more

On Sept. 17, the highly regarded World Justice Project released a detailed report reflecting some major good news amidst a continuing modest slide in Americans’ trust in our institutions. Encouragingly, WJP’s survey of voters shows that more than 90 percent of Americans in both parties — an unheard-of polling number — believe that ...Read more

This month, a brief, ambitious and many would say calamitous experiment came to an end: Oregon rolled back Measure 110, its policy decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of illicit drugs. Rather than handing out small fines with a nudge towards treatment, the police are once again giving misdemeanors to people who are found with opioids...Read more

Over a decade ago, when political parties didn’t treat their rivals as mortal enemies, the Republican president of the Florida Senate, Jeff Atwater, would remind his colleagues: “Don’t fear the debate.”

I remember them as simple words uttered as tensions mounted during particularly contentious partisan disagreements. But anyone with a ...Read more

Trained as a physicist, Sean M. Kirkpatrick has spent most of his career in government, much of it as an intelligence and technology expert for various Pentagon agencies, culminating in an 18-month stint as the government's lead investigator of UFOs.

It was in that latter position — as the first director of the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly ...Read more

It was always a given that dehumanizing rhetoric around immigration would intensify as the presidential election approached. Unfortunately, in the turn to dangerous lies about established communities of immigrants in American towns, it has gotten much worse — and, in Western Pennsylvania, closer to home — than even most cynics expected.

...Read more

Say you’re a ruthless narcissist and a natural-born dictator, and you’re reviewing footage of this month’s presidential debate in Philadelphia. It’s obvious that you got far too little time during the sparring, and inspired not nearly as much fear and awe as are your due. So you decide to spring your “October surprise.”

I’m not ...Read more

As investigators sort through what appears to be a second assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump last weekend, partisans are predictably blaming each other for incendiary rhetoric and extremist politics. One thing that might ease the tension is for the two presidential candidates to keep doing what they’ve been doing in recent ...Read more

Scientists have pieced together enough clues to Earth’s past climate to graph the average temperature from 485 million years ago to the present — back to a time long before dinosaurs and even trees, when the land was either barren or hosted mostly moss, millipedes and primitive insects. This new work shows temperatures spent hundreds of ...Read more

The 2024 election is shaping up to be a “Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know" kind of contest.

That saying is rooted in ambiguity aversion bias. Even if a situation is bad, individuals would rather stay with what they know rather than face uncertainty.

So it goes with our presidential nominees, Vice President Kamala ...Read more