Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gambled by calling a snap election – and he has won big.

Voters handed Abe’s Liberal Democratic Party a sweeping victory in the Oct. 22 balloting for Japan’s House of Representatives.

The call for the election came in late September after North Korea had just fired another test missile, with its lo...

Would you pay someone US$150,000 to have your baby?

The high cost of surrogacy in the U.S. has pushed many potential parents to seek cheaper options elsewhere. Countries like India and Thailand have attracted surrogacy clients from countries like the U.S., Britain, Australia and Israel. The global surrogacy trade, however, has been fraught with scan...

Have you ever wondered why your computer often shows you ads that seem tailor-made for your interests? The answer is big data. By combing through extremely large datasets, analysts can reveal patterns in your behavior.

A...

The Trump administration’s executive order changing some elements of the Affordable Care Act’s administration are creating uncertainty as open enrollment for the health insurance marketplaces is set to start...

For almost five months, 21 million people in the southern Philippines have been living under martial law.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte declared martial law in the province of Mindanao in May in response to increasing Islamist...

Is Mara Salvatrucha, the Salvadoran youth gang menacing residents in some U.S. cities, really America’s public enemy number one?

After months of boasting that it would “destroy” MS-13, the Trump administration has now declared the group a top crime-fighting priority. U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has instructed the...

Conservatives have been seething since 2013 over what they say was an unfair and imbalanced effort by the IRS to scrutinize right-leaning organizations more closely than other groups seeking nonprofit status.

As a new report from the Treasury...

Some people are afraid that heavily armed artificially intelligent robots might take over the world, enslaving humanity – or perhaps exterminating us. These people, including tech-industry billionaire Elon Musk and eminent physicist Stephen...

It’s not an easy time to be a journalist in the United States. Since 2000, nearly half of newsroom jobs – more than 20,000 of them – have disappeared.

Rubbing salt into the wounds, CareerCast named “newspaper reporter” the worst of 200 jobs in 2016 for the third successive year. (Pest control worker...

Editor’s note: On Friday, Oct. 20, “Third Rail with OZY” will ask: Is marriage dead?

This roundup of stories from The Conversation archive explores trends and pressures affecting the institution of marriage around the world.

#1: Fewer ‘I dos’

There’s no doubt:...