The Supreme Court heard arguments on Monday over which drug offenses trigger mandatory 15-year sentences under the Armed Career Criminal Act, which is a kind of federal three-strikes law. The justices had three choices. By the end of the arguments, most of them seemed to have settled on a middle ground. The law imposes the…
In a 7,000-word essay for Foreign Affairs magazine published this week, Jake Sullivan, President Biden’s national security adviser, tried to sum up the state of the Middle East. “Although the Middle East remains beset with perennial challenges,” he wrote in the original version of the essay, “the region is quieter than it has been for…
After weeks of tense wrangling between the White House and House Republicans, the fiscal deal reached on Saturday to raise the debt ceiling while constraining federal spending bolsters President Biden’s argument that he is the one figure who can still do bipartisanship in a profoundly partisan era. But it comes at the cost of rankling many in…
Milton Viorst, who melded journalism and history to presage the chaotic consequences of an American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the improbability of peace in the Middle East unless Israel agreed to a separate Palestinian state, died on Dec. 9 in Washington. He was 92. His wife, the author Judith Viorst, said the cause…