As a retired military officer, I do not publicly endorse candidates.

But as someone who served as a judge advocate, or military lawyer, for 34 years, I do think it can be helpful to examine in a nonpartisan way the legal aspects of Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric on the use of force against the Islamic State, or ISIS.

Here are two recent...

Imagine that scientists find an indisputable link between microcephaly and the Zika virus. Then imagine that they find a simple way to prevent it, but that the solution is not implemented.

A similar scenario is playing out with neural tube defects. We have known for decades that folic acid can prevent most common...

The U.S. is currently in a decade-long hurricane “drought”: no major hurricanes of category 3 or higher have made landfall in the U.S. since Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in 2005. With damage costs for U.S. hurricanes from 1970 to 2002 estimated at US$57 billion (in 2015 dollars), this landfall drought is fortuitous for coastal...

Are people in the U.S. getting enough to eat?

Unfortunately, even though the U.S. is bountiful and the world’s biggest individual exporter of food, millions of Americans actually are not.

Each year the Department of Agriculture runs a nationwide survey to determine how many people go hungry. The latest figures show almost 6 percent of...

Some potholes are like zombies – they never die. Or at least that’s the perception of much of the driving public, especially as we enter peak pothole season: late winter and early spring.

At a minimum, potholes create rough roads and poor...

In an interview last month, George Stephanopoulos asked Donald Trump about his retweet of a follower who insisted that both Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz were ineligible for the presidency.

Trump dismissed Stephanopoulos' question with “it was a retweet” – as if to say that retweeting someone else’s claim meant that he...

Reforming Wall Street has become a key issue in the ongoing presidential primaries.

Bernie Sanders in particular has used his rival’s close ties to the financial industry, including speaking fees and political donations, to suggest Hillary Clinton wouldn’t rein in Wall Street. At the same time, Sanders has tried to highlight his own...

Traditionally, low oil prices have been a boost to economic growth in the U.S. The crash in oil prices over the past two years, however, has produced a decidedly mixed picture – with potentially worrying implications for the economy as a whole.

When oil prices fall, consumers spend less on gasoline and have more disposable income to spend on...

This past February, when many of their peers were still asleep, a group of Tufts University students got on a bus to New Hampshire to take advantage of a once-every-four-years opportunity: seeing presidential candidates making their final pitch to voters.

Research shows that campaigns that directly contact young people boost youth turnout. Knocking...

Access to safe and effective birth control is part of health care for tens of millions of Americans. The vast majority of Americans view birth control as “morally acceptable,” and make sharp distinctions between approval for methods of preventing pregnancy, and methods of terminating it.

Despite this, access to birth control has become...