Jillian Weinberger

While moderate Republican and independent women express their frustration with the GOP's stance on social issues like contraception, President Obama's reelection team is trying to seize the moment and court female voters for November. Meanwhile, the Republican candidates head south, where primary voters will vote in Alabama and Mississippi on Tuesday. And while the jobs numbers looked promising last week, a number of new economic indicators will tell us much more about the economy this week, with figures on consumer spending, retail sales, and inflation. Finally, Eurozone finance ministers will decide whether Greece deserves a second bailout this week.

One year ago this Sunday a massive earthquake devastated northeast Japan. The Japanese barely had time to catch their breath before waves of water 30 feet high crashed down on the coast. Twenty-thousand people died; 90,000 were evacuated. The natural disasters were soon followed by a nuclear crisis. In the year since the meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, Japan has had to face difficult questions on the state of their nuclear regulations and the country’s energy future.

Last Monday, as most elected officials returned home, one state senator spent the night out… at a homeless shelter. Former New Jersey Governor Richard Codey is now a state senator from Essex and Morris Counties. On Monday night, disguised with a pasted-on gray beard and some effective make-up, the man who once ran New Jersey slept at the Goodwill Mission in Newark. His night out marked the end of a four-month investigation into the state’s services for the mentally ill. New Jersey, like a number of states across the country, has been hit with severe budget cuts in the wake of the financial crisis. Codey was determined to find out just how these service cuts have affected citizens in his district. 

As the Republican Presidential candidates fight for the GOP nomination, President Obama is getting slammed on all sides. While voters consistently say that the economy is the most important issue in this election, the Republican candidates are particularly critical of President Obama’s foreign policy. Both Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney criticized President Obama for his stance on Iran's nuclear capabilities at the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) Conference earlier this week. Santorum was particularly critical of the President for apologizing for the Koran burnings in Afghanistan last month. 

Of all the states up for grabs on Super Tuesday, Ohio was the biggest prize. Ohio has long been considered a bellwether in presidential politics. Living in a rust belt state, Ohioans are more concerned about their economic future than ever before, but social issues like abortion and marriage are also near and dear to the Ohio conservatives who showed up at the polls yesterday. So what decided Ohio Republican votes on Super Tuesday this year? What do the Ohio results forecast for the general election? 

Religion plays a fundamental role in daily life, and in political life, to believers and non-believers both. And while wars have been fought and era-defining antagonisms built for centuries between opposing religions, the relatively recent antagonism between believers and non-believers has reached something of a fever pitch. You can trace it to the Enlightenment, but the likes of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have brought the argument to a head … or maybe to a standstill. Is any kind of progress possible in a debate between religious-believers and atheists? Or is there just a never-breakable impasse between the two worldviews?

Vladimir Putin has been called the accidental president. Putin, Russia's current prime minister, is in the midst of campaigning for his third presidential term, but his name was hardly known until 1999, when then-President Boris Yeltsin plucked the former KGB officer from obscurity and thrust him into the Russian spotlight. Russian voters will decide Putin's presidential fate at the polls this weekend, and a new book by journalist Masha Gessen exposes the secrets behind the meteoric rise of the man who has changed the course of Russian history. Gessen chronicles Putin's story through the story of modern Russia, exploring the leader's complicated relationship with the United States and with Russian business and media. 

Leymah Gbowee, a speaker at TED2012, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 for her pivotal role with Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, the women's peace movement that, in 2003, helped end the four-year-long Second Liberian Civil War. She shared the award with Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first female president of Liberia. In the wake of the controversy around Sirleaf's reelection, Gbowee was asked by the president to start a "national peace and reconciliation initiative" to address the growing political and ideological tensions within the country.

As Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad continue to bomb opposition strongholds, the international community considers its options. On Tuesday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before Congress against President Assad making an argument that Assad would "fit into that category" of "war criminals." A meeting at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva on Wednesday also signaled renewed diplomatic efforts in Syria, but exactly how the international community might intervene remains to be seen.

In the past couple years, the economy has become the focus of media coverage, politics and national debate. Movements like Occupy Wall Street brought issues of economic disparity and class to the center stage. But where and how does race fit into all this? 

T. Boone Pickens is an unlikely environmentalist. The native Oklahoman made his fortune in the oil business, and then, in 2008, shifted his focus to America's energy future. The result is the Pickens Plan, an energy policy to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil through alternative energy and natural gas. Pickens will detail his plan at the TED Conference in Long Beach, California, this week, where John Hockenberry is also speaking. 

After nine long years in Iraq and an ongoing, tenuous drawdown in Afghanistan, few politicians on either side of the aisle want to get involved in another war. These days, many inside and outside of the Beltway feel that the best way to deal with international conflicts is merely to provide the "seed money": given enough time and arms, the Syrians can oust Bashar al-Assad on their own; Israel can stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon.

The Republican presidential candidates prepare for primary battles in Michigan and Arizona, two states hit particularly hard by the economic crisis. Mitt Romney won the support of Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, but will his popularity in Arizona help him rise in the Michigan polls? In economic news, the German parliament prepares for a vote on the Greek bailout package, and while gasoline prices rise, consumers may not be too concerned.

The Oscar-nominated documentary Incident in New Baghdad recounts the 2007 killings of two Reuters reporters by US attack helicopters, footage of which was released by WikiLeaks in 201...

In 2009, filmmaker Danfung Dennis was embedded with U.S. Marines "Echo Company" as the marines launched a major offensive on the Taliban stronghold of Helmand province in Afghanistan. Danfung worked closely with Sergeant Nathan Harris, one of the Marines leading the charge. When Danfung returned to U.S. a few months later, he discovered that Sergeant. Harris had been gravely injured, just two weeks before his battalion was scheduled to return home. The story of Sergeant Harris’s recovery is now the focus of Danfung Dennis’s newest documentary, "Hell and Back Again."

In 1958, Mildred and Richard Loving were arrested in their own home, in the middle of the night, for the crime of miscegenation. When the Supreme Court declared miscegenation laws illegal in 1967, 16 states still had such laws on the books. A new poll released this week by the Pew Research Center shows just how far we’ve come in the five decades since the Lovings’ arrest. 15 percent of new marriages in 2010 crossed racial or ethnic lines, double the rate from 1980. And a great majority of Americans say they would readily accept an interracial marriage in their family.

Historian Robert Kagan holds the distinction of influencing both Mitt Romney and President Obama's political discourse. A foreign policy adviser to the Romney campaign, Kagan's ideas were also evident in President Obama’s state of the union address, which disputes the claim that America is in decline.  

Since its founding, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has grappled with how to balance personal liberty and national security. The bureau grew exponentially in the years following World War I, as the country became increasingly terrified by the communist threat. The fear of communism often served as a guide for J. Edgar Hoover, the man who built the FBI and ran the Bureau for more than 40 years.

President Obama began his 2012 presidential campaign last month with a stop at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where he addressed young, swing-state voters about the need for affordable higher education in the coming decades. The question that remains is how can public universities keep tuition costs down in a depressed economy. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology might have an answer. This spring, MIT announced the launch of MITx, an online learning platform that offers MIT classes for free.

Many modern political dynasties are built on "like father, like son." However, Mitt Romney's cautious presidential bid in many ways highlights how he's different from his old man. In 1967, former Michigan Governor George Romney candidly revealed that he had changed his stance on the Vietnam War with the remark, "When I came back from Vietnam, I had just about the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get." Most pundits agree that this remark effectively ended George Romney's 1968 presidential campaign.