In a hyperpartisan Washington, centrists like Maine’s Senator Collins are both more isolated and more powerful than ever. This special report – the result of months of reporting and exclusive interviews – examines the arc of Collins’s career and whether her brand of moderation is becoming a relic of the past or holds the key to the future. 

For well over a month, US news has been dominated by the forcible separation of immigrant families and efforts to reunite them. With less than a week before a court-ordered deadline, we look at where the federal government is in that process.

US President Trump, like other modern presidents, views one-on-one meetings with foreign leaders as a critical diplomatic tool. His meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin shared broad similarities with, for example, the Kennedy-Krushchev summit of 1961 and the Bush-Putin meeting of 2001. Still, it represents a fundamental shift. In critical contrast with Mr. Trump’s approach – as evidenced in his meetings with Putin and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un – are the preparation and safeguards built into past summitry. The promise, from Trump’s perspective, is the prospect of breaking through diplomatic strictures and tapping personal chemistry to unknot disputes. The potential peril is that, in advance of definitive results, the United States deals away concessions and weakens future leverage. Previous US presidents arrived with a set agenda and warnings from advisers on potential pitfalls. They were wary of the message that simply meeting authoritarian adversaries could send. When President Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, it was only after thousands of hours of planning and a series of secret visits by his national security adviser to Beijing. No detail, including the communiqué, was left to chance.

The US Patent Office's 10 millionth patent is a testament to American innovation. But the patent rolls also shed light on a persistent challenge: gender disparities in innovation-heavy fields.

This next story comes from Kommersant in Russia. It is one of several from world news outlets that the Monitor is publishing this summer as part of an international effort to highlight solutions journalism.

It was a daring rescue of some of the world’s most daring rescuers.

Over the weekend, a team of countries worked together to arrange the evacuation of volunteer rescue workers known as White Helmets from immediate threat in Syria.

For years the volunteers, officially called the Syria Civil Defense and famous for their white hard hats, have rushed to save civilians trapped in the rubble caused by airstrikes from Syrian warplanes. Their work has saved as many as 100,000 lives and was made famous in an Oscar-winning documentary.

Now, about 100 of the White Helmets along with their families had to be saved from the rubble of a war that has become the most dangerous place on earth for health-care providers.

The symbolism of the rescue should not be lost.

The Syrian regime, along with its allies, Russia and Iran, has directly targeted selfless relief workers, including the estimated 3,000 White Helmet volunteers, using people’s need for health care as a weapon against them. Thousands of aid workers have been killed or forced to flee the country.

The attacks are a clear violation of humanitarian law that requires respect and safety for neutral aid workers in a war zone in order to tend to the injured. That long-held international norm, written into the Geneva Conventions, is a recognition of the innocence of noncombatants in a conflict and the need to preserve life during war.

The rescue shows just how ingrained this norm has become – even to the point that Israel and an Arab state, Jordan, collaborated in the effort.

At the request of the United States and European countries, Israel opened its border with Syria to help transport the besieged group of 422 people to Jordan. “The [White Helmets] are the bravest of the brave and in a desperate situation this is at least one ray of hope,” tweeted Jeremy Hunt, the British foreign secretary.

In addition, several nations, including Canada, Germany, and Britain, promised Jordan – which is already overwhelmed with some 1.3 million Syrian refugees – that they would resettle the volunteers and their family members in their countries.

Syria’s seven-year war is just one place where the world must put its arms around the innocent. In the past six years, more armed groups have emerged than in the previous six decades, threatening both civilians and aid workers, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

One purpose of humanitarian law is to create a safe space for people, especially during a conflict, to remember that what unites them is far greater than what tries to divide them. The rescue is a positive example of the law’s reach in protecting people.