"Neocon Middle East Policy" reviews strategies and consequences of the "Clean Break" plan authored by Richard Perle, David Wurmser, and Douglas Feith in 1996. A must-read for anyone concerned about the convergence of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy in the Middle East.

In February, 2003, the Sudanese Liberation Army in Darfur (the western region of Sudan) after years of oppression took up arms against the Sudanese government. The government and allied militias answered the rebellion with mass murder, rape and the wholesale destruction of villages and livelihood, resulting in one of the world's largest humanitarian and political crises. Up to 2 million people were displaced; 400,000 people killed.
In October and November, 2004, after watching woefully inadequate media coverage on the crisis in Darfur, a team of three independent filmmakers trekked to...

In Trying Biology, Adam R. Shapiro convincingly dispels many conventional assumptions about the 1925 Scopes monkey trial. Most view it as an event driven primarily by a conflict between science and religion. Countering this, Shapiro shows the importance of timing: the Scopes trial occurred at a crucial moment in the history of biology textbook publishing, education reform in Tennessee, and progressive school reform across the country. He places the trial in this broad context alongside American Protestant antievolution sentiment and in doing so sheds new light on the trial and the...

A front-line human rights defender fighting murderous impunity in the Mexican borderlands

The Mexican border state of Chihuahua and its city Juarez have become notorious the world over as hotbeds of violence. Drug cartel battles and official corruption result in more murders annually in Chihuahua than in wartorn Afghanistan. Thanks to a culture of impunity, 97 percent of the killings in Juarez go unsolved. Despite a climate of fear, a small group of human rights activists, exemplified by the Chihuahua lawyer and organizer Lucha Castro, works to identify the killers and their...