Congress rewrote patent law last year to reduce the number of unwarranted patents and curb abusive lawsuits by “patent trolls,” but the federal courts have done significantly more than lawmakers to strike a better balance among innovators, consumers and patent owners. A good example is a ruling issued last week that rejected attempts by Apple and Motorola to stop the sale of each other’s smartphones. It was a welcome rebuke to companies that have been tying up the courts with patent infringement

NEW YORK ― We are just recovering, in the United States, from the entirely predictable kerfuffle over a plaint published by Anne-Marie Slaughter, former director of policy planning at the State Department and a professor at Princeton University, called “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.” The response was predictable because Slaughter’s article is one that is published in the U.S. by a revolving cast of powerful (most often white) women every three years or so.The article, whoever has written it

My dad always worked. He worked his day. He worked at his small publishing business when he got home. He worked on weekends and birthdays. He worked through the Lord’s Season, reveling blasphemous through holidays. When I think of him, work is the first image in my mind. I see him unloading boxes of books, mashing saddle-stitched staplers. I see him in the kitchen frying fish for his brood of children, mixing cornbread from scratch. I see him whacking kids, quashing our brief rebellions.We were

Lee Sang-deuk, the elder brother of President Lee Myung-bak, is to be summoned by prosecutors today for questioning in connection with the ongoing savings bank scandal.Investigators have reportedly secured evidence suggesting that the former six-term lawmaker of the ruling Saenuri Party took hundreds of millions of won in bribes from Lim Seok, the disgraced chairman of Solomon Savings Bank, between 2008 and 2010. Solomon was suspended from operations in May due to capital shortages. The presiden

As baby boomers have begun to retire en masse, the government is pushing to introduce a new system to help them stay in work longer. Under the proposed scheme, workers aged 50 and older will be given the right to request a shorter workweek, which will involve a corresponding reduction in pay, in order to put off their retirement. Officials of the Ministry of Health and Welfare say the scheme will not only help baby boomers ― people born between 1955 and 1963 ― stay longer at their current jobs b

Now that Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident, is settling into a new life in the United States after decades of persecution by China’s venal, autocratic government, he is receiving a hero’s welcome he never anticipated and now does not appear to appreciate.Chen had dedicated much of his life to campaigning against involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.Well, in the U.S., right-to-life advocates in Ameri

While all eyes are on the Supreme Court and Obamacare, a quieter battle is being waged against the president’s other major initiative, the Dodd-Frank financial reform act.Wall Street has already watered down or delayed most of Dodd-Frank. Now it wants to create a giant loophole, exempting its foreign branches from the law.Yet the overseas branches of Wall Street banks are where the banks have done some of their wilder betting. Four years ago, bad bets by American International Group’s London off

With a historic and just decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation Thursday moved a giant step closer to a health care system that will work for all Americans.By ruling the individual insurance mandate constitutional under the taxing authority of Congress, the court preserved the delicately balanced structure of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.In order to make medical insurance accessible to the sick, Congress needed to ensure that plenty of healthy people were paying into

Russia claims it is willing to link divided Korea with energy pipelines and electricity grids. But its economic relations with North Korea indicate a return to the Cold War politics of the past. In 1948 Stalin sponsored the creation of the DPRK in the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The following year, Prime Minister Kim Il-sung travelled to Moscow to collect a 2 percent interest loan of 212 million Soviet Rubles. Some of this money was allocated to build the centrally-planned economy, bu

TOKYO ― Few recent elections have grabbed world attention in the way that Greece’s vote on June 17 did. Now that the center-right New Democracy, which finished first, has formed a coalition government with the center-left PASOK and the Democratic Left, the key issue for Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s administration is whether it can implement the austerity measures agreed with Greece’s eurozone partners in exchange for continued support from the International Monetary Fund and the European Uni

BARCELONA ― The line of credit to Spain from fellow eurozone governments may help to stabilize a fragile banking system, at least in the short term, but it is a missed opportunity. Spain’s banking crisis provides a perfect opening to move towards a European banking union.In the medium term, help to Spain will merely reinforce the link between the sovereign and the banks’ problems, causing even greater fragmentation in the European banking market and pushing Spain closer to potential insolvency b

In the “caring and sharing community” that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations aims to be, hundreds of thousands of the Rohingya minority are stateless. Resisting deportation back to Myanmar, their “boatpeople” shuttle dangerously back and forth across the seas. Meanwhile, Indonesians protest the treatment of undocumented migrants in Malaysia, while Thailand’s neighbors fear spillover of that nation’s armed conflict in the south. At home, Papuans still report fears of extrajudicial killin

BERKELEY ― We economists who are steeped in economic and financial history ― and aware of the history of economic thought concerning financial crises and their effects ― have reason to be proud of our analyses over the past five years. We understood where we were heading, because we knew where we had been.In particular, we understood that the rapid run-up of house prices, coupled with the extension of leverage, posed macroeconomic dangers. We recognized that large bubble-driven losses in assets

On June 24, China made a large stride in space exploration by successfully conducting a manual docking between a manned spacecraft and an experimental orbiting lab module. The feat, carried out by three Chinese astronauts aboard the Shenzhou 9 spacecraft, took China one step closer to its dream of building a space station by 2020. On the same day, China made another technological breakthrough under the sea, which carried just as much, if not more, significance than the space docking exercise. It

It is shocking that the state-of-the-art display technology of Samsung Mobile Display and LG Display has been leaked abroad, probably to some of their foreign rivals. According to prosecutors, circumstantial evidence suggests that circuit diagrams of the two companies’ active-matrix organic light-emitting diode, or Amoled, display technology have been leaked to their rivals in China and Taiwan, including the BOE Technology Group in China, and AU Optronics Corp. in Taiwan.Prosecutors say the susp

KIFISIA, Greece ― This upscale suburb of Athens offers a snapshot of a country sliding toward bankruptcy. It’s an ugly picture, as expectations of prosperity and stability vanish, and fear begins to take over. The trendy shops in the town center looked empty during a visit this week; many stylish restaurants were said to be closed or open only on weekends; banks here, as everywhere in Greece, have been depleted over the past month by a riptide of withdrawals. I’m here visiting Yannos Papantoniou

STOCKHOLM ― Julian Assange’s bizarre bid for political asylum in Ecuador’s embassy in London has claimed headlines everywhere, but it has obscured an important truth: last month’s decision by the United Kingdom’s Supreme Court that Assange should be extradited to Sweden to face allegations of sexual crimes was the only possible outcome. The alternative ― to reject the European arrest warrant issued by Swedish authorities ― would have signaled distrust of Sweden’s legal system, which would have b

PARIS ― From Hong Kong to Sao Paulo, and all points between, one word dominates all others among big investors: Greece. Will the Greeks remain in the eurozone? What will happen to the European Union and the global economy if they do not?Until recently, Europe was a sort of mirror that confirmed for the major emerging economies the spectacular nature of their own success. They could contrast their high growth rates with Europe’s high levels of debt. They could oppose their “positive energy” with

WASHINGTON ― It’s hard for a journalist to be objective on the subject of leaks, a bit like asking a lawyer if he thinks litigation is a good method for resolving disputes. People in the news business always have a bias toward more information, even on sensitive subjects involving intelligence policy. So the reader should discount for my inherent bias in favor of informing the public, and of the process that leads to disclosure ― namely, leaks. We are in a new debate about leaks, flowing mainly

ISLAMABAD ― On June 19, in what it called a “short order,” Pakistan’s Supreme Court removed Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani as the country’s prime minister, a post that he had held for more than four years ― longer than any of his 16 predecessors. For those who favor democracy in Pakistan, the court’s decision is cause, not for concern, but for celebration.Gilani had been convicted weeks earlier of contempt of court, after he refused to comply with a court order directing him to write to Swiss authoriti