The Latest Breaking News from Naomi Schalit

A hastily arranged summit between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin is set for Aug. 15, 2025, in Alaska, where the two leaders will discuss a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will not attend, barring a last-minute change. The Conversation’s politics editor Naomi…

Get rid of states? Legal scholar Stephen Legomsky, who taught for 34 years at the Washington University in St. Louis School of Law, has just published a book, “Reimagining the American Union,” that proposes a radical idea: Abolish state government. The Conversation’s politics and democracy editor, Naomi Schalit – a…

Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, collecting items from clothing to signs that will help tell the story of the 2024 presidential election. Conversation U.S. politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed them last week, before they set out…

Thousands of Republicans, from a presidential candidate to grassroots party members, began assembling in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, for that quadrennial political ritual, the party convention. Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History were there, too. They’re self-described “scavengers” of the physical objects that make…

With an assassination attempt on Donald Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania on July 13, 2024, the U.S. experienced another violent episode in its increasingly polarized politics. Former President Trump, who’s about to formally become the GOP nominee for president in the 2024 election, survived the attempted assassination when, initial…

College and university campuses across the U.S. have seen polarization and unrest since the Israel-Hamas war began with the Hamas attack on Israeli civilians on Oct. 7, 2023. Students and faculty have held protests and rallies, argued on social media and signed statements, some of which have increased mistrust and…

Hamas took more than 200 people hostage during its deadly rampage in Israeli border towns on Oct. 7, 2023. Among the hostages are children and the elderly. While four of them have been released, the fate of the rest is unknown, as Qatar serves as an intermediary in working to…

As national security scholar Gregory F. Treverton says, the brief mutiny mounted by Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny V. Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, may be over, but the dramatic events sparked by that mutiny are “still unfolding.” In this interview with The Conversation U.S. democracy editor Naomi Schalit,…

Lawyer Thomas A. Durkin has spent much of his career working in national security law, representing clients in a variety of national security and domestic terrorism matters. Joseph Ferguson was a national security prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois, where Durkin was also a…