The video of "Chongqing Superman" has gone viral amidst the explosion of protests across China against the government's "zero COVID" policy. A man in a grey T-shirt with a Superman backpack stands on a street corner in the southwest Chinese city of Chongqing, ranting against the soaring price of carrots -- and the government's failed strategy to totally eliminate COVID. He fiercely denounces the...

In April 2022, the world’s richest person, Elon Musk, asked, “Is Twitter dying?” Five days later, he launched an apparently whimsical bid to buy the social media platform. It took months of legal wrangling to complete the deal, but on Oct. 27, Musk honored his $44 billion offer, acquiring a new toy: free speech. Financially, Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was an odd move. Despite its user base of...

Dec. 5 marks the 1,000th day since the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic. With social distancing, vaccines and other interventions as well as natural infection, the world may be seeing a glimmer of light at the end of the pandemic tunnel. But the pandemic is still not over. China has posted record numbers of cases lately and concern is growing that the COVID-19 in China wi...

A good way to predict future changes in a language is to listen to young people because they usually carry patterns in language use with them as they age. In the South Korea, the language of young people differs greatly from older generations, which suggests sweeping changes in language use in the years to come. Vocabulary changes most quickly as new words appear and spread in response to social...

Ukraine has notched another big victory in its war against Russian aggression: the liberation of the Kherson without a grueling urban battle. Yet that triumph was met with mixed messages from US President Joe Biden’s administration on a very sensitive subject: whether the Ukrainians should begin peace negotiations with Russia. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Mark Milley, argued t...

I once went to the village of Koreme in Iraqi Kurdistan and walked along a dirt road past a little brick school and a makeshift mosque to a dusty field of almond trees and high grass where all the males of the village -- age 13 to 43 -- had been taken in 1988 and told to squat, side by side. Iraqi soldiers then opened fire, and 27 Kurdish men and boys were killed. I spoke to one of the few surviv...

Recently, the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington launched a project called “Renewing America.” The CFR came up with a compelling reason for it. According to their recent statement, “Some of the most important national security threats to the United States come not from without, but from within. With its Renewing America initiative, the Council for Foreign Relations is monitoring nine crit...

If you've been yearning for a preview of the battle for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, the place to be last weekend was Las Vegas, where the Republican Jewish Coalition held what some attendees cheekily called a "kosher cattle call" for potential candidates. Former Vice President Mike Pence was there. So were former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki H...

Our news screens were erupting with breaking news of yet another mass shooting. But this time the news that began with a barrage of bullets also became something special -- a tale of battlefield heroics on the homefront of a nightspot in Colorado Springs. A brave military veteran, Richard Fierro, had rushed toward the first flashes of light as he had been trained to do. He smashed the gunman to ...

Ukraine’s capture of Kherson two weeks ago, coming after months of grueling combat, was perhaps the most humiliating setback for Russian forces since the war began nine months ago. The successful Ukrainian counteroffensive occurred five weeks after Putin declared Kherson, as well as Donetsk, Luhansk and Zaporizhzhia, a part of Russian territory. The Kremlin’s propaganda network has gone to work e...