World Politics

In May 2012 Kaspersky exposed Flame — a massive cyberespionage toolkit aimed at Iran, with 86 fake-identity domains and all the hallmarks of a state operation.

The '1%' was really a 0.1% problem: the elite whose wealth buys the rules themselves. On inequality, Occupy, and why the policy answers differ.

India's Supreme Court ruled that sex obtained through a false promise of marriage constitutes rape under the IPC — a major statement on consent in Indian law.

The 2012 western wildfire season — six states burning, Colorado's Waldo Canyon destroying 346 homes, and a firefighting system stretched past its limits.

May 2012: Egypt's first-round results pointed to a runoff between the Muslim Brotherhood's Mohamed Morsi and Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmed Shafiq.

The 2012 speculation that Obama might swap Biden for Hillary Clinton as his running mate — the electoral logic, the arguments against, and why it never

In May 2012 a Guernsey auction house tried to sell a vial allegedly holding Ronald Reagan's blood from 1981. The Reagan Foundation objected — and won.

Immigration fraud investigators have a secret weapon: the mundane. Where are the takeaway menus, who wrote the rent cheque — the simple questions that trip

In May 2012 a French prosecutor in Lille opened a preliminary rape investigation against Strauss-Kahn over an alleged December 2010 incident in Washington.

In 2012 Florida found about 53,000 deceased people on its voter rolls — a real administrative backlog that became political ammunition on all sides.

In 2012 Kabul, Shakila Naderi ran a driving school for women — a small, pointed act of normalization in a city where public space was still deeply gendered.

April 2012 polls briefly showed Mitt Romney closing the gender gap with women voters. The movement, the spin, and what November actually delivered.

The Washington Post's May 2012 report on Mitt Romney's Cranbrook hair-cutting incident raised questions about memory, cruelty, and what adolescence tells us

Documents seized from Abbottabad showed bin Laden wanted Obama assassinated but Biden spared — judging the vice president too unready to inherit the presidency.

Blind activist Chen Guangcheng's 2012 escape to the US Embassy in Beijing put Hillary Clinton at the center of a human-rights versus geopolitics crisis.

A 2012 report told of an Indian worker returning home after 18 years of bondage in Saudi Arabia — a stark window into the Gulf migrant-worker trap.

About 150 Afghan schoolgirls were poisoned after drinking contaminated water at a school in Takhar on April 17, 2012 — officials blamed opponents of female

Hilary Rosen's claim that Ann Romney 'never worked a day in her life' detonated a mommy-war controversy in April 2012 — and both campaigns fled the blast.

Barack Obama's 'we didn't have the luxury' remark about Michelle's $316,962 hospital salary — a gaffe about privilege, debt, and the politics of working

Bundler Abake Assongba raised $50,000 for Obama's re-election — then was accused of defrauding a businessman of $650,000 and impersonating a bank official.