On May 1, the Dow Jones Industrial Average hit its highest peak since December 2007. But April’s jobs report was a disappointment ― only 115,000 new jobs were created. At least 125,000 are required each month just to keep up with the growth of our working-age population.What’s going on?Shares are up because corporate profits are up, and profits are up largely because companies have figured out how to do more with less.One of the most striking legacies of the Great Recession has been the decline

India and Korea are two flourishing democracies in the modern world. There is much in common, although not very obvious, in the social and cultural spectrum. In the past, Indian culture, especially Buddhism, inspired Korean society in a big way. However, today things are different. Korea has leapfrogged economically, as well as socially, way ahead of India, while India is struggling. A role reversal has taken place and today it is Korea that can inspire India in many ways.What Korea has achieved

Political upheaval in Europe reached a new apex over the weekend when French voters threw out their incumbent president and Greeks gave the heave-ho to the ruling parliamentary coalition. The results suggest that a new consensus is emerging in Europe in favor of more economic stimulus, but they also call into question the continent’s ability to agree on a plan to keep its fiscal problems from spreading uncontrollably.European leaders had agreed to a series of pacts that would rescue Greece and o

On May 2, the South Korean National Assembly passed a law introducing a national carbon trading scheme by 2015. This is a truly significant moment not only in terms of Korea’s national efforts to tackle climate change, but also because it underlines the emergence of a nascent Asian-Pacific carbon emissions trading hub with the potential to be a tipping point in the global fight against climate change.So why is Korea’s move so important when the country is responsible for fewer than 2 percent of

PARIS ― When Francois Hollande, fresh from his election as France’s next president, was asked by a journalist which language he would use when he meets U.S. President Barack Obama for the first time, his answer was revealing. “I speak English more fluently than the former president,” the Socialist leader insisted, referring to the outgoing Nicolas Sarkozy. “But a French president must speak French!”In proclaiming his mastery of the lingua franca of global affairs, Hollande was asserting himself

WASHINGTON ― Whenever the CIA uncovers a new plot overseas, like al-Qaida’s latest scheme to blow up civilian aircraft using advanced, hard-to-detect explosives, people breathe a sigh of relief. But this is a multifront war, and almost by definition, the attack that gets you is the one you didn’t see coming. For the past few months, I’ve been hearing private warnings about another threat to commercial planes ― namely, the spread of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles from Libya after the overt

European elections over the last few days dealt a stunning blow to austerity, one of most profoundly mistaken economic policies propounded in modern times.The French voted President Nicolas Sarkozy out of office. In Greek parliamentary elections, anti-austerity parties triumphed. The same held true for local elections in Britain and elsewhere.For several years now, German politicians and technocrats, primarily, have directed their profligate southern European neighbors to impose brutal austerity

The Democratic Party of Japan decided Tuesday to lift the suspension of former DPJ President Ichiro Ozawa’s party membership. The move followed last month’s court decision that found Ozawa not guilty of falsely reporting political funds handled by his political funds management body, Rikuzan-kai.In February 2011, after Ozawa had been indicted on charges of violating the Political Funds Control Law, the then party leadership “suspended his party membership until a court ruling on his case becomes

The case of the blind Chinese activist Chen Guangcheng could well have trapped China and the United States in a test of strength from which neither side would have found it easy to back down. A prolonged confrontation might have ensued if the incident had happened at a time when China was not as self-confident and America habitually acted out of a sense of all-knowing might. The way the impasse was resolved is a development to be thankful for, as it might be something of a full-dress preview of

The killing of Vice Mayor Abel Martinez of Mambusao, Capiz in central Philippines may have unofficially but bloodily opened the 2013 election season, violence being a trademark of Philippine elections. No less than Interior Secretary Jesse M. Robredo has warned that he expects political killings to rise in the months leading to the midterm elections, following the assassination of Martinez. But Philippine National Police (PNP) spokesperson Senior Supt. Generoso Cerbo Jr. has cautioned against li

Perhaps there has been little in recent years in Sino-U.S. relations that has caused as much of an international furor as the case of the blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng.This was not a case of a dissident seeking political asylum but of a blind man, a self-taught lawyer, who had won domestic and international renown for his promotion of human rights. He ran afoul of local authorities in Linyi prefecture because of his protests against forced abortions imposed arbitrarily by local aut

Reinventing NATO By Karl-Heinz Kamp ROME -- This month, NATO will hold its next summit in Chicago. Unlike European Union summits, which take place almost monthly, NATO’s are infrequent. This helps to explain the inflated rhetoric that surrounds them: the November 2010 summit in Lisbon, for example, was described as nothing less than “the most important in NATO’s history.” Will the Chicago summit prove to be an exception to this rule?For a while, that seemed likely, with the meeting initially bil

NEW YORK ― This year’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund made clear that Europe and the international community remain rudderless when it comes to economic policy. Financial leaders, from finance ministers to leaders of private financial institutions, reiterated the current mantra: the crisis countries have to get their houses in order, reduce their deficits, bring down their national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth. Confidence, it was repeatedly said, nee

France has elected only the second Socialist president in its history ― the first being Francois Mitterrand, who spent 14 years in the driver’s seat back when French presidential terms lasted seven years rather than five, and who made a hard-right turn away from economic socialism and toward spending cuts after his first two years in office. The best France can hope for now is that the newly elected Francois Hollande takes a similar plunge into a pothole of pragmatism and douses any budding soci

In the satirical novel “Tristram Shandy” (published 1759-67), Laurence Sterne tells the story of Tristram Shandy, a gentleman who sets out to narrate “the history of myself.” Tristram wants to begin with the beginning of his life. This, however, turns out to be a complex task. Although the novel starts with a scene during which a woman is about to give birth to Tristram, our hero is actually not born until many pages later, about halfway through the novel. For Tristram realizes that before he ca

A bill to revise the Software Industry Promotion Act was passed on May 2 along with some 60 others during the last session of the 18th National Assembly. The revised law, which goes into effect from next January, bans chaebol-affiliated IT service companies from working on public-sector projects.The new regulation is one of the initiatives the government has recently taken to jump-start the stagnating domestic software industry, which it has pledged to foster as one of the nation’s future growth

The mainstream faction of the United Progressive Party is digging itself deeper into a hole as it struggles to retain power in the face of mounting pressure to take responsibility for alleged fraud in the primaries for the April 11 general election.The faction, led by Lee Jung-hee, one of the UPP’s four co-leaders, rejected the recommendation adopted by the party’s National Steering Committee over the weekend that the three proportional representation lawmakers-elect chosen through the primary r

It would be a mistake to interpret the election of France’s socialist presidential challenger, Francois Hollande, as portending a seismic shift for Europe’s second- largest economy. All indications are that Hollande doesn’t owe his victory to any passion among the electorate for a sweeping left-leaning platform. The defeated incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, is merely the latest leader felled by Europe’s economic crisis and the lassitude of its citizens. His flamboyant, hyperkinetic persona had grown

BERLIN ― The emergence of a united Europe is a process that has been going on for decades, characterized by progress but also by setbacks. There have been crises again and again in the history of European unification. Crucially, Europe has always found an answer to these crises and come out of them strengthened in the end. It will be the same this time if the political actors face up to the great challenges and muster the political will to overcome them.Since the founding of the European Coal an

Most dissidents in China have to face a simple but potentially life-changing question at some point in their lives: Should I stay or should I go?The answer, unfortunately, is not as straightforward.As the Chen Guangcheng incident has shown, deciding whether to leave China and go into exile is an extremely tough call.The blind legal activist was adamant that he did not want to leave his country during his stay in the United States embassy in Beijing, but changed his mind after leaving the secured