Nation & World

What to expect in 2011 and beyond? After this month’s midterm elections, Harvard’s resident analysts look ahead to Congress’ upcoming agenda, from tax reform to foreign policy to the 2012 political calculus.

Harvard Law School students and United States Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts participated in the final round of the annual HLS Ames Moot Court Competition on Nov. 16.

Chief Justice Margaret Marshall of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court warned of troubled courts and politicized judiciaries while delivering the Paul Tillich Lecture at the Memorial Church at Harvard.

Building on the library model developed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie in the late 1800s, philanthropist John Wood and his nonprofit, Room to Read, are aiding education in the developing world.

Linda Greenhouse, a former New York Times reporter and now the Joseph Goldstein Lecturer in Law at Yale University, and Reva Siegel, the Nicholas deB. Katzenbach Professor of Law at Yale, provided new perspectives on interpreting Roe v. Wade during the 2010-11 Maurine and Robert Rothschild Lecture at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Harvard alumni elected to Washington offices, governorships.

UNESCO director-general cites progress on international rights, but says gender equality lags in regions like sub-Saharan Africa, where as many as 12 million girls never attend school.

Economist Marc Melitz improves models of international trade by viewing broad trends in tandem with the behavior of individual corporations.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York and former congressman Joe Scarborough, now the host of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” identified big problems with the U.S. political system and traded ideas on how to address them during a discussion at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum.

Professor Jill Lepore, a contributor to The New Yorker, examines the movement behind the tea party in “The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History.”

Deborah Bial, Ed.M.’96, Ed.D.’04, founder of the Posse Foundation, spoke to a Harvard audience about her organization’s efforts to help economically disadvantaged kids prepare for and then succeed in college.

In a talk at Harvard’s Center for Government and International Studies, Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh said he was disappointed in the Obama administration’s approach to Afghanistan and criticized U.S. journalists for not being aggressive enough in their coverage of American foreign policy.

Radcliffe researcher explores the connection between cultures where men have more than one wife and increased violence.

Financial reforms just enacted, said FDIC chair Sheila Bair, will put risk where it belongs, and usher in a new era of stability, efficiency, and consumer protection.

Students at Harvard Kennedy School try their hands at political forecasting for the upcoming midterm elections.

Foreign Minister Makhdoom Shah Mahmood Qureshi of Pakistan sketched a blueprint for strengthening U.S.-Pakistan ties during a talk at the Kennedy School on Oct. 18.

Harvard authorities on Southeast Asia see trouble on the horizon for rice production and consumption by billions of people dependent on the grain. The threats come from water shortages, salinization, and bad resource management.

In a two-day conference a group of Harvard scholars joined leaders in the private and public sectors to explore gender gaps in societal, political, and economic realms, as well as the means of developing policy, corporate practices, and leadership strategies to foster gender diversity.

Harvard experts from a variety of fields discussed the Pakistan flooding disaster, saying that poverty blocks preparedness and an enduring commitment is needed to help the nation recover.

The World Economic Forum came to Harvard in an effort to engage the academic community, particularly its students, in the pressing issues of the day, from the international monetary system to trade to the population explosion.

Harvard panel examines fiscal problems of the past two years, and what it will take to restore the economy to health.

Harvard University held a University-wide forum, “The Economic Crisis, Two Years Later: A Panel of Harvard Experts,” on Tuesday, October 12 at 4:00PM.

Remembering award-winning journalist and Harvard graduate David Halberstam, a panel of journalists explored his legacy and the future of investigative reporting in a digital age.

Harvard authorities across many fields offer their ideas on how to get the nation’s lagging economy back on track.

Conference on “Sex Work in Asia,” hosted by the Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard Medical School, discusses issue involving more than 8 million people.

A doctoral student recounts her overseas summer internship researching Kenya’s colonial history for a new exhibit.

A question-and-answer session with Harvard Law School Dean Martha Minow and professor Noah Feldman discusses the arrival of former dean Elena Kagan on the U.S. Supreme Court, and the likely issues for the year ahead in American jurisprudence.

As faith-based charities take more federal money to perform social services, part of the price is increasing ethical and moral dilemmas.

Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s minister of foreign affairs, delivered messages of cooperation and inclusiveness while elaborating on his six principles for Turkey’s future at a Harvard Kennedy School forum.

If slavery and totalitarianism were the great moral issues of the 19th and 20th centuries, then the worldwide oppression of women and girls will be the defining issue of the 21st, said Nicholas D. Kristof, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The New York Times, in a talk at Harvard Medical School’s Carl Walter Amphitheater.