Opinions

Whether Barack Obama's multi-nation, overseas tour amounts to a political stunt - as critics claim - or not, the presumptive Democratic nominee for president and U.S. senator from Illinois is moving in the right direction.

"The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper." - Aristotle

Ethics enforcement in Washington still seems too much of a challenge for House lawmakers.

Two days before former White House spokesman Tony Snow died of colon cancer, I went in for my first screening.

The next president faces a daunting challenge: to keep this country going without wrecking the environment.

At the start of every presidential race, the Democrats perform a masochistic ritual. They promise to take a stand in Dixieland, get in touch with their inner NASCAR, sweet-talk the Southerners with a heavy emphasis on faith and flag.

ERNEY-VOLTAIRE, France In a park near the center of this serene town on the Swiss border is a glass-and-concrete community center named for Jean Calas, an 18th-century merchant who was put to death for hanging his son.

A mere 422 million miles from Earth, NASA's phenomenal planet-searcher, the Phoenix Lander, is busy giving scientists valuable information about life on Mars.

To an amazing extent, Bush foreign policy seems to be turning toward the positions of Barack Obama.

In March, President Bush wrongly vetoed a law that would have banned any use of waterboarding. So while the CIA says it has not used waterboarding since 2003, it remains an option.

Minimum-wage workers have been stuck in a losing game of "Mother May I" with the federal government. Workers step forward when the government says yes to raising the minimum wage. Workers step backward when the cost of living increases, but the minimum wage doesn't.

Would somebody please tell Jesse Jackson to go somewhere - anywhere - and sit down?

Charlotte must have greeted the recent news from the U.S. Census with joy. The city rose from the nation's 20th-largest city to 19th. (Allow me to mourn that it had to pass my hometown of Baltimore to do it. I guess killer crab cakes and a harbor view are no longer enough.)

College graduates with engineering, math and science degrees find jobs more quickly and at higher pay than graduates in most other fields.

WASHINGTON After years of deficit spending, economic turmoil, and occupation wars abroad, which have all hollowed and dispirited the nation, we are stumbling into the most important presidential election campaign in decades.

Many Americans are reconsidering their family budgets as prices for food, gas, health care and other essentials continue to rise - while stock-market and real-estate losses have cut into their assets.

Imagine that Savana is your 13-year-old eighth-grader, an honor student sitting in math class when the assistant principal pulls her down to the office.

Why isn't Obama further ahead?

MOSCOW In his foreign policy speech to the diplomatic corps in Moscow on July 15, President Dmitri Medvedev made the interesting claim that the falsification of history is often a prelude to the violation of international law - something for which he implicitly attacked the West. It is certainly true that the study of the history of the law of nations can illuminate the way it has recently been perverted. And as it happens, that history is one in which Russia has played a key role.