Irene Khan, the first woman and Muslim to head Amnesty International, and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, on the global state of human rights.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof says global sex trafficking is 21st-century slavery — and he wants Barack Obama to abolish it.

The Beijing Olympics are about to open. Whatever happened to all the campaigns to leverage China on Darfur, Tibet, and more, with the Games?

Myanmar and the world’s responsibility to protect the desperate.

The images out of China are heartbreaking. Whole villages essentially flattened by Monday’s powerful earthquake in mountainous Sichuan province. Schools down. Hospitals down. Grieving families standing in the rain.
And now, news of dams at risk of bursting. Maybe 20,000 dead. Maybe many more.
Beijing has responded with a hundred thousand soldiers and a national call for [...]

World food prices are soaring. The world’s poor are hurting. And the price hikes may pinch in a supermarket near you.
In Cameroon and Burkina Faso and Egypt and Indonesia, they’ve rallied and rioted over hunger and the high price of food. In Haiti, they’ve turned out a government.
The U.N. calls it a “silent tsunami,” but [...]

People’s Square, in the middle of Shanghai, is not like Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Shanghai’s square is huge — but green. It feels in April a bit like Central Park.
A few months ago something extraordinary—for China—happened here. Thousands of people marched into People’s Square to protest the extension of a high-speed Maglev train line through [...]

You know the news out of Iraq these days: the surge seems to be working, at least for now. Some refugees are trickling back in. The U.S. military complains that Iraq’s politicians aren’t doing their part to stabilize the country. Foreign jihadis are on the run. There’s still not much oil flowing.
To Iraqi citizens these [...]

Michael Mukasey’s confirmation as Attorney General looked like a sure thing. Now, with the legal definition of torture in the balance, Democrats aren’t so sure.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guests:
Charlie Savage, reporter for The Boston Globe, is author of “Takeover: The Return of the Imperial Presidency and the Subversion of American Democracy.”
John McGinnis, professor at Northwestern University School of [...]

Iraqi scholar Kanan Makiya was a passionate, powerful advocate of American intervention in Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein. He laid Saddam’s crimes before the world, begged for action, dreamed of the democracy that could be.
He promised George Bush in the Oval Office that American soldiers would be greeted with “sweets and flowers” in [...]