Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Political Issues

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    Civil War: What’s in a Name?

    IrA mostly insiders-only debate about whether Iraq is in a state of civil war broke out into the open last week when two major news organizations announced that they would henceforth refer to the conflict as a civil war. According to polling in September by the Pew Research Center, much of the public had already […]

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    Israel and the Future of Zionism

    Key West, Florida Some of the nation’s leading journalists gathered in Key West, Fla., in December 2006 for the Pew Forum’s biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life. Peter Berkowitz, a Hoover Institution fellow, and Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli paper Ha’aretz, offered a brief history of Zionism and argued […]

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    Legislating International Religious Freedom

    Library of Congress Washington, D.C. With the passage of the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, the United States became one of the few countries in the world to make promotion of religious freedom an explicit foreign policy goal. The act, signed into law by President Clinton, established an Office of International Religious Freedom at […]

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    Split State Decisions on “Culture War” Issues

    by Robert Ruby, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life November 8, 2006 Voters in South Dakota on Tuesday rejected what would have been the nation’s most restrictive law against abortion, and Arizona became the first state to defeat a ballot initiative to ban same-sex marriage. Of the eight states where bans on gay marriage […]

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    Judicial Showdown: The Supreme Court Returns to the Abortion Debate

    Washington, D.C. On Nov. 8, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases that challenge the constitutionality of the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act. The Act aims to prohibit a doctor from performing what the legislation calls a “partial birth” abortion unless a pregnant woman’s life is in danger. Is the law […]