The Conversation

By William Petri – The Conversation With COVID-19 vaccines currently in the final phase of study, you’ve probably been wondering how the FDA will decide if a vaccine is safe and effective. Based on the status of the Phase 3 trials currently underway, it is unlikely that the results of these… »

If the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is replaced this year, the Supreme Court will become something the country has not seen since the justices became a dominant force in American cultural life after World War II: a decidedly conservative court. A court with a 6-3 conservative majority would be… »

In her first state of the union address as president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen called out hatred and pledged to build “a union of equality”. While European institutions have been at the forefront of fighting hate crime and discrimination in and outside of the EU,… »

Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline. Reliable large-scale data on Iranians’ post-revolutionary religious beliefs, however, has always… »

On a Tuesday morning in September 2001, the American experience with terrorism was fundamentally altered. Two thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six people were killed as the direct result of attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania. Thousands more, including many first responders, later lost their lives to health complications from… »

The UK left the EU on January 31 this year. Yet, the trading relationship between the two parties will not change until January 1 2021, when the transition period agreed by both sides expires. And with negotiators heading into their eighth round of talks to decide what the future relationship… »

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe ended weeks of speculation about the state of his health by announcing his surprise resignation today. The 65-year-old Abe was finally forced to concede to the ulcerative colitis intestinal disease that had brought his first brief term in office to an end in 2007. After being treated… »

Today, U.S. laws and regulations bar kids under the age of 14 from working in most industries. Children under 17 may not work more than three hours on school days, for example. Ever wonder where these rules came from? While studying this issue for more than a decade, I’ve learned that… »

Many tourists – especially people who come from western democracies – are fascinated with the communist pasts of central and eastern European countries. Their desire to gaze upon, consume and experience the remnants of life behind the Iron Curtain contrasts with the desire of many local people to distance and… »

Global business travel has largely ground to a halt during the pandemic. Experts have been raising the alarm that this is the death of business travel as we know it, arguing that it will be a long time before the virus is really gone and that business people have become used… »