Therese Raphael

Prices have been rising across many areas, but the one we’re likely to notice most this winter are energy bills. This won’t just affect household budgets; there will be political repercussions too. Dramatic increases in UK and European wholesale power prices in recent weeks are driving up the…

Vaccines never promised us perfect protection. Yet studies are showing that our defenses are declining faster than expected. One from Oxford University published last week showed that the efficacy of the BioNTech/Pfizer Inc. vaccine was halved after four months. Another, published Tuesday by the…

Whenever G7 leaders gather, the optics usually say more than the anodyne communiques issued afterwards. Fortunately for Joe Biden, there will be no group photo from Tuesday’s virtual summit to talk about Afghanistan. The withdrawal debacle has left the world’s preeminent power looking like the…

The rapid fall of Afghanistan to Taliban control presents the UK and its NATO allies with two primary dilemmas — the first is immediately pressing, the second has longer-term implications. The urgent task is to determine a policy for Afghans seeking refuge. Although there are many calls, from…

Senior UK ministers are hardly paupers, but by the standards of high-flying private sector jobs, they don’t exactly rake it in. That’s why it’s called public service. Power has its own perks, however. Many former top-tier public officials soon make up the gap in earnings after they leave office. …

For much of the pandemic, Britain provided a cautionary tale in how not to manage a crisis. It charted some of the world’s worst death rates, a care home infection fest and a series of policy reversals that sorely tested public trust. Should it now be the country the US looks to as an example of…

On the list of things to worry about in the age of SARS-CoV-2, boring, old winter flu probably doesn’t rank highly. Especially not in the middle of a summer heat wave. And yet it should. Humanity has grown so accustomed to annual waves of influenza that it was the baseline comparison when Covid…

“I had to get out of America. It has gotten so ugly, so dark and my pessimism had grown so high that I needed to do something different.” That’s how pollster Frank Luntz, currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Policy Studies, explained his decision to spend a summer in Britain studying…

In the UK, July 19 is being called Freedom Day. To some, it will feel a bit like England winning the Euros. After 15-plus months of setbacks, uncertainty and constraints on everyday life, there will be something to celebrate: Brits can congregate without restriction and are free to bin or burn…

“I had to get out of America. It has gotten so ugly, so dark and my pessimism had grown so high that I needed to do something different.” That’s how pollster Frank Luntz, currently a visiting fellow at the Center for Policy Studies, explained his decision to spend a summer in Britain studying…