Most tomatoes from Mexico will face a 21% tariff effective July 14, the U.S. Department of Commerce said recently. Ironically, the “love apple” may be the perfect illustration of how trade contributes to economic prosperity…

Chinese journalist Gao Yu has been a thorn in the side of China’s authorities for decades. Jailed three times for her work — I covered one of those jailings, in the 1990s, as a foreign…

In a pamphlet published in 1711, Jonathan Swift lamented the “folly” of those who “mistake the echo of a London coffeehouse for the voice of the kingdom.” Those informal salons were, he wrote, frequented by…

Amid a world with growing rancor and discord and hate and war, we have lost a needed voice for peace and human compassion with the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday, leaving behind a…

Since my son was old enough to sit on his own, he loved to play in the dirt. When he was a toddler and we lived in New Mexico, we could sit him in our…

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest theologian, but I think I can say with certainty that it’s disgraceful and disrespectful to try to exploit the resurrection of Jesus for political gain. And as…

It was with real dismay that I read about the gutting of AmeriCorps on Thursday. The civil service program was created in 1993 as a domestic version of the Peace Corps. AmeriCorps volunteers serve for…

For a few years, a major hotel chain ran a series of commercials that I thought were both highly amusing and quite brilliant. A group of tourists were in the control room of a nuclear…

Underpaid for years, Kansas legislators finally received a substantial pay increase this year.  Instead of a paltry per diem (per day) allowance, they now receive $43,000 per year and remain eligible for KPERS benefits. Normally,…

Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran has been tapped in the new Congress to join a bipartisan “working group” on the 340B Drug Pricing Program — a title that sounds vague enough to mean anything but important…