The verdicts came in quickly from advocates and opponents of the Affordable Care Act. Here's a look at the most astute commentaries about the Supreme Court's decision...

Bill Moyers invited us to come on his show this week to chat about dark money, the undisclosed, often untraceable political spending made possible by the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision. In a wide-ranging (and incredibly gracious) interview, he asked us about everything from the latest super-PAC machinations to the nexus between political money and income inequality. Watch...

The last days of a Supreme Court term rarely show off the Justices to great advantage. Like other mortals, they have put off doing their hardest work, so only the most controversial cases remain. They are tired. They are frustrated. By a vote of 6-3, they need haircuts. (Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan appear recently barbered; Stephen Breyer is bald.) But none of the usual end-of-year excuses explain the behavior in court yesterday of Antonin Scalia...

A Fortune investigation reveals that the ATF never intentionally allowed guns to fall into the hands of Mexican drug cartels. How the world came to believe just the opposite is a tale of rivalry, murder, and political bloodlust...

A surprise assault by lightly armed Syrian insurgents on a military base housing the elite Republican Guard in Damascus, just a few miles from the Presidental Palace, elicited a furious military response on Tuesday, with government forces shelling surrounding neighborhoods in an escalation that brought combat in the Syrian conflict close to the heart of the capital. Anti-government activists estimated at least 33 people were killed in the artillery barrages of the Damascus suburb of Qudssaya aimed at the Free Syrian Army insurgents, less than three miles northwest of President Bashar al-Assad’s official residence, and on Barzeh in northern Damascus, about three miles northeast...

...In China, immigration poses new questions, and the philosophical and practical pressures are very different. For centuries, it was not an issue: beset by poverty and upheaval, the Chinese were the ones headed abroad, and hardly anyone was showing up looking for shelter. Now that the tables have turned, the legal infrastructure is lacking. As recently as the mid-eighties, foreigners registered in Beijing were not permitted to leave a radius of twenty kilometers from Tiananmen Square, without permission, according to China Daily...

US military barracks have come a long way from the Beetle Bailey cartoon days, when troops slept in rows of metal bunks and awoke with "Reveille." Today’s new soldiers are inheritors of living quarters that more closely resemble condominiums.

But there are more lax regulations in the barracks that have come with compassion for troops who have been fighting wars for a decade – and with it, growing concern that the privacy afforded in these living quarters may need to be reevaluated in the wake of growing instances of sexual assault, senior military officials say...

Nora Ephron, an essayist and humorist in the Dorothy Parker mold (only smarter and funnier, some said) who became one of her era’s most successful screenwriters and filmmakers, making romantic comedy hits like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “When Harry Met Sally,” died Tuesday night in Manhattan. She was 71...

The world shifted a bit on its axis on April 23, 2005. On that night, Jawed Karim uploaded a video to a site he and others had recently created called YouTube. He named the video simply for what it was, "Me @ the Zoo."

That's also the title of a weird but compelling documentary airing Monday night on HBO about a young man who'd be judged fairly outrageous in any community, but especially in the city of Bristol, Tenn...

The Indian economy is slowing down, and the impact will be global. One of the fastest-growing economies of the last decade has slipped from almost 9 percent growth to less than 6 percent. The reasons are many, but questions about the leadership at the top are a problem. The woman who ran the world’s largest democracy for much of the last decade, Sonia Gandhi, is apparently in poor health, and the Indian political establishment senses change is coming...