It may sound farfetched to say that movies can offer healing and personal growth. It is true nonetheless. Movies, just like novels and music, can offer insight into issues we are struggling with, provoke realizations, and provide us with extraordinary healing power. Perhaps that is why some psychiatrists in New York City reportedly prescribe titles of movies instead of pills these days. While watc

President Lee Myung-bak began his European tour meeting with German leaders Monday. With few pressing issues on hand, other than how to increase economic cooperation using the just-ratified Korea-European Union Free Trade Agreement, Lee’s week-long trip through Germany, Denmark and France will be a respite from the headaches at home complicated by a by-election defeat, falling approval ratings and

Koreans love kimchi so much that they want global citizens to enjoy the unique side dish, which they do not hesitate to identify with the Korean culture itself. The people who make the world’s biggest ships, best color TV sets and cell phones, and increasingly reliable automobiles have wondered why Korean food had to be rated below Thai and Vietnamese, let alone Chinese or Japanese.So, they are th

The American mission in Afghanistan changed with two quick shots from a Navy SEAL last Sunday.The calls for reflection on the nature of the war on terror with the death of Osama bin Laden have merit. Al-Qaida and its leader were the reasons behind 100,000 U.S. troops facing daily dangers.In a world without bin Laden, the terror war could be as legitimately staged in Somalia, Yemen or Iran.Even bef

Even though the threat of a government shutdown is over for now, the federal services that Americans depend on are still at risk of disappearing.House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to reduce the deficit by gutting $375 billion from the federal government in the next 10 years would severely threaten the important work of the nation’s federal workforce.As would the recommendations put forth b

The cardinal sin of political prognostication is static analysis.A short weekend ago the emerging wisdom was that President Barack Obama’s reelection was in peril. The House Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy of California, perhaps the most politically attuned elected member of his party, was saying that while he always believed Republicans would have a good year in 2012, he now thought it was likely

Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t lose too much sleep about China’s Facebook beating him to Wall Street.Renren Inc. is the first social-networking website to go public in the U.S., raising $743 million with which founder Joseph Chen can tap China’s 1.3 billion people. China is a market Facebook Inc. has yet to friend and the U.S. equity market is a place Zuckerberg has yet to tread.Here’s the thing, thoug

NEWPORT BEACH ― It was relegated to the Q&A session, rather than featured prominently in the opening statement, at last week’s first-ever press conference of U.S. Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke. It is an issue that too many in Washington, DC are willing to dismiss as “transitory,” despite visible evidence to the contrary. It is extremely vulnerable to high oil and food prices. And it

MUNICH ― Why did Greece, Ireland, and Portugal have to seek shelter under the European Union’s rescue umbrella, and why is Spain a potential candidate?For many, the answer is obvious: international markets no longer want to finance the “PIGS.” But that is only half true. In fact, international markets have not financed any of them to a considerable extent for the past three years; the European Cen

NEW YORK ― The world is drowning in corporate fraud, and the problems are probably greatest in rich countries ― those with supposedly “good governance.” Poor-country governments probably accept more bribes and commit more offenses, but it is rich countries that host the global companies that carry out the largest offenses. Money talks, and it is corrupting politics and markets all over the world.H

There was a time when all one had to worry about from video games were ― for parents ― their affects on children’s homework and eyesight, possible violent content, their cost and ― for game makers ― pirated game cassettes.Those good old days were officially over yesterday (May 2) as video game giant Sony apologized for a security breach that caused the loss of some 77 million accounts’ personal in

Greece? Been there. Ireland? Done that. Portugal? Got the T-shirt. For the past year, countries sharing the euro have been going bust one by one.So where’s next? Plenty of people will point the finger at Spain. Some at Italy. A few single out Belgium, a country with high debts, and no government.But they should be looking somewhere else: France.It is increasingly politically unstable, its debt pos

BERKELEY ― The most interesting moment at a recent conference held in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire ― site of the 1945 conference that created today’s global economic architecture ― came when Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf quizzed former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, President Barack Obama’s ex-assistant for economic policy. “(Doesn’t) what has happened in the past few years,” Wolf

VIENNA ― In a study released in early April, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Representative on Freedom of the Media, Dunja Mijatovi, reported that 57 journalists are currently in prison in Turkey, mostly on the basis of the country’s antiterrorism laws. With 11 more Turkish journalists also facing charges, the total number could soon double the records of Iran and China,

MOSCOW ― Two years ago last month in Prague, U.S. President Barack Obama put forward his visionary idea of the world free of nuclear weapons. A year ago, a new strategic arms treaty between Russia and the U.S. was signed in the same city. Now the worldwide wave of support for a full ban on nuclear weapons, or “nuclear zero,” is being transformed into a debate about nuclear deterrence. Indeed, the

When President Obama visited El Salvador in March, he offered an acute analysis of the danger represented by homegrown criminal gangs and international narcotics cartels. This is a shared problem with a shared responsibility, the president declared.Nice speech, but where’s the beef? The unrestricted flow of drugs into the United States via Central America ― or Mexico, or the Caribbean ― represents

Are we at a hinge of history? When I heard the news about Osama bin Laden and saw the cathartic outpouring of pride in this country, my mind went back not just to Sept. 11, but to a couple of other dates that mark the course of global events, pregnant with promise or peril.We won’t know for years the consequences of the killing of bin Laden for U.S. foreign policy; they might be transitory. But th

NEW DELHI ― The killing of Osama bin Laden by United States special forces in a helicopter assault on a sprawling luxury mansion near Islamabad recalls the capture of other al-Qaida leaders in Pakistani cities. Once again, we see that the real terrorist sanctuaries are located not along Pakistan’s borders with Afghanistan and India, but in the Pakistani heartland.This, in turn, underlines another

If President Benigno Aquino wonders why the Philippines isn’t shaking its junk-bond status, a visit to the local supermarket might set him straight.There, he will find that food prices are surging and pushing growing numbers of his people into extreme poverty ― the less-than-$1.25-a-day kind. The Manila-based Asian Development Bank says as many as 64 million more Asians may suffer this fate in 201

Global warming has made the protection of the environment a moral ― even a near-sacrosanct ― issue in the developed world. Environmental concerns have reached such a level that the creation of plants or industries that may do Mother Nature damage is being put on the backburner by governments, even in the implementation of economic development projects. In a country like Taiwan, it’s a problem of c