I'm handing this one over to my wife, whose story represents the heartbreak and hope of many:

While I grew up in Washington, DC, my husband and I currently live in Los Angeles. We decided we had to come for the inauguration, and booked our flight. We lucked into tickets...

Barack Obama is about to make history by becoming the first major party's presidential nominee with an identifying trait that once would have automatically disqualified him for the job. No, I'm not talking about his African American heritage -- I'm taking about his past illegal drug use. Not just of...

Maybe one reason we're not making any headway in the war on terror is that we're wasting more time, money and effort than ever doing battle with that other mortal threat to the Republic: American marijuana smokers. We're no closer to catching Osama, but we're doing a historic job of...

CALIFORNIA'S PRISONS are in crisis, bursting at the seams with nearly twice as many inmates as they were designed to hold. Things are so bad that this month, federal judges will begin holding hearings on whether to impose inmate population caps. The Legislature's solution: build 53,000 new prison beds, at...

From their plush offices in Malibu, the consultants of The Burke Group are raking in millions from a single, specialized service: helping other companies prevent their workers from unionizing.

Brought in by corporate customers from General Electric to K-Mart to private hospitals, the Burke Group's hired guns are masters...

Anyone with a marginally functional brain is of course skeptical of the Bush administration's claims that Iran is directly fomenting anti-American violence in Iraq. It's a transparently trumped-up charge that looks a whole lot like the trumped-up charges that got us into this misbegotten war. But what's worse, it's a...

Nestled between soaring mountains and the ocean, Vancouver is as pleasant a city as you'll ever find - especially if you're an illegal drug user. Beset in recent years by a flood of narcotics accompanied by surging overdoses and HIV infections, Canada's third-largest city has radically overhauled its police...