Military recruiting stations are often humble affairs. The modest-looking storefront Army recruiting station in Hagerstown, Md., is no exception: a few cubicles, some posters, an American flag, and the seven Army values listed on the wall. The simple fact is that the people who join up with Uncle Sam usually don’t need to be...
Before Charles Seife was a journalist, he studied mathematics. In Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception, the New York University professor and science writer studies our faith in numbers and how it can be manipulated. He chatted recently with U.S. News about why numbers often lie. Excerpts:
The judiciary tossed the politically hot potato of gay rights in the military back to the executive branch after a federal judge in California last week issued an injunction stopping enforcement of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The prohibition on openly gay men and women serving in the military has been Pentagon policy...
Taking leave of the capital’s sweltering August humidity and the growing chorus of small-government Tea Parties erupting across the country, President Obama and his family headed to Martha’s Vineyard. Yet the holiday this past summer wasn’t all the peace and quiet the Obamas had been searching for. Churning up the white-capped surface of Vineyard...
Half a century ago, Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson outlined the paradox of the First Amendment in terms both memorable and eloquent: “The sound of tireless voices is the price we pay for the right to hear the music of our own opinions.”
In one of the Senate’s grand hearing rooms last week, 12 senators sitting on a special committee of impeachment convened to deliberate removing a federal judge from the bench, the first such proceeding in more than 20 years. Virginia Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte and California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff are serving as the prosecutors.
Are UFOs a mirage, conjured up by the Air Force to obscure classified flight projects? In part, argues Mark Pilkington, a British journalist and filmmaker who writes about society’s oddities. In Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs, he makes a persuasive case that much UFO-logy canon was started or...
Living up to its reputation as the world’s most secretive and insular state, North Korea is expected to host a secret congress of the country’s ruling Communist Party this month, the first such conclave since 1966 and one that experts believe is intended to help usher in a successor to dictator Kim Jong Il.
The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the Obama administration’s alleged inclusion of a radical, Yemen-based cleric on a “kill list” of foreign terrorists. What makes this case particularly salient is that the cleric, al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki, is an American citizen. Can the United States target one of its citizens without, at...
Even if the “New START” nuclear arms reduction treaty is ratified by the Senate (and that is uncertain after Senate sponsors postponed debate this week until fall, at the earliest), the United States and Russia will still maintain large arsenals of missiles on hair-trigger alert. Meanwhile, other nations are tempted to join the nuclear-weapons...