The West - naive, provincial and parochial - firmly believed that the rot was confined to the upper echelons of communist and socialist societies.

The facts are these: most (though by no means all) Western diplomats in the nightmarish wasteland that is East Europe and the Balkans, the unctuously fulsome and the frowzily wizened alike, are ageing and sybaritic basket cases.

The gun control debate in America is a battle between personal freedom and public safety. For nearly 160 years, there were no limits to the Second Amendment, which guarantees "the right of the people to keep and bear arms."

Cloning is the process of creating an exact copy of the original, and recently, "cloning" refers to the replication of living humans and animals. Somatic cell nuclear transfer, as the process is called, involves removing the nucleus from an egg cell and replacing it with the nucleus from a cell of the organism to be cloned. In the past few years, advances have been made in both human and animal cloning. Scottish scientists famously cloned a sheep, and British scientists reportedly cloned a human embryo that survived for five days. Cloning is an extremely controversial subject that forces society to examine the proper limits of man's control over life.

Affirmative action is one of the most controversial political issues facing America. Most often, affirmative action assists disadvantaged groups by improving placement in higher education and employment, and the term is most often conceived as a program to improve the standing of African Americans. People take several stances on the issue, supporting their opinions with various justifications, such as the need for equality and natural competition. Although it was created to help advance the position of disadvantaged peoples, some view affirmative action as an unfair, and even prejudicial, force in our society.