How ironic that the White House chose to withdraw from the United Nations Human Rights Council on Tuesday just as President Trump was manipulating the suffering of migrant children for his own political ends.

The Trump team quit the council on account of that body's fixation with Israel and inclusion of member states with wretched human rights ...Read more

Democracy's decline and fall seems aided, abetted and hastened when democracy's watchdogs fail to bark.

And sometimes they include my former colleagues in the White House press corps. Often, when President Donald Trump and his spokespeople persist in making claims that are flat-out false, our journalistic watchdogs don't seem to be up to the ...Read more

With the World Cup underway in Russia, the host country is naturally enjoying a lot of international attention. Conspicuously absent from that coverage, however, are Moscow's many transgressions since it won the bid in 2010 to host. The Russia of 2018 probably wouldn't even get the chance.

Russia won the bid on June 8, 2010, three days before ...Read more

Right now, in Washington and in states across the country, there is a battle over the future of America. Democrats are scrambling to find a path to victory in 2018.

Americans are looking to Democrats to stand up against the petulant, racist and phony populist rhetoric and policy coming from the White House and President Donald Trump's enablers ...Read more

The Supreme Court once again passed up a historic opportunity to finally put some limits on partisan gerrymandering. In a pair of cases from Wisconsin and Maryland, the court declined to take on the big question: When does gerrymandering, the drawing of districts to benefit the political party in control, go so far as to be illegal?

The result ...Read more

Vegetarian interlopers are carving out a growing foothold in the meat and dairy sections of America's grocery stores, and the conventional food industry is not happy about it. Fearing substitute products that increasingly look and taste like the real thing, the beef and dairy industries recently asked the federal government to protect their once...Read more

The Trump-produced horror show at the U.S. border represents the rock-bottom of American responses to the challenge of immigration -- a cruel and immoral abuse of children for midterm political gain by a cynical president -- but it comes at the end of a long, tortured road.

For 30 years, since President Ronald Reagan's offer of amnesty and a ...Read more

Without warning, she dropped her head and began to cry.

Jessica, whose young son played nearby at a South Los Angeles health clinic, put her hands over her face to cover her tears.

When I asked what was wrong, she told me her husband had been ordered by Guatemalan gangsters to pay a protection tax or every member of his family would be killed....Read more

After raising expectations that it would finally deal with the harm caused by partisan gerrymandering, the Supreme Court on Monday essentially said: "Never mind." It was an exasperating abdication of responsibility by the court, which should have used the cases before it to strike a blow against the time-dishonored practice of drawing ...Read more

As condemnations grow over President Trump's "zero tolerance" policy toward illegal border crossings, under which 2,000 children have been separated from their parents, President Trump on Monday morning took aim at ... Germany.

"The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the already tenuous Berlin ...Read more

President Donald Trump's failure to understand that he represents all Americans, not just his strongest supporters, might explain why he has the lowest approval rating of any president at this point in a first term. And it might be the reason he has repeatedly attempted a bargaining gambit that failed each time.

The maneuvers he tried to pull ...Read more

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Elihu M. Berle ruled in March that coffee should carry the warning labels mandated by California's Proposition 65 because the brew contains acrylamide, a chemical that some studies found increases the incidence of cancer in rats. It was an unfortunate outcome of a ridiculous lawsuit by an opportunistic attorney ...Read more

The World Health Organization has a lot on its plate these days. Ebola's made a comeback in central Africa. There are still parts of the world where polio has yet to be rubbed out. The agency is looking into the beginnings of a cholera outbreak in Cameroon, and continues the fight against malaria in parts of Latin America. Next up for the world'...Read more

Controversial and stepped-up law enforcement separating children from their parents suspected of illegally crossing the southwestern U.S. border is a broad example of what conservatives and liberals should be agreeing on: Zero tolerance policies don't work.

They don't work in schools. They don't work in the criminal justice system. They don't ...Read more

Chances are pretty good that you haven't felt the sting of President Donald Trump's punitive tariff policies. But you will.

The president announced late Monday that China had (unsurprisingly) refused to buckle in the face of his decision to slap tariffs on $50 billion worth of goods imported into the United States. Instead, China had retaliated...Read more

Is President Donald Trump on the path to destroying the international system the U.S. created after World War II?

Since Trump blew up the G-7 summit, launching a flurry of insults at America's closest allies on his way to flattering North Korean tyrant Kim Jong Un, there has been no shortage of pessimists warning that this postwar system is ...Read more