There will come a day when the U.S. Supreme Court decides that affirmative action is no longer constitutional. The question is whether that day comes before or after the rest of America decides that affirmative action is no longer necessary. All that’s certain is that neither day is today. In a 7-to-1 ruling, the court agreed that the University of Texas can consider race as a factor in admissions. A diverse student body, wrote Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, “is a constitutionally permissible goal.

WASHINGTON ― Congress and the courts will sort out the big questions about privacy and surveillance posed by Edward Snowden’s disclosure of National Security Agency monitoring programs. In the meantime, there are some nagging smaller questions raised by this hemorrhage of secrets. These mundane questions interest me partly because the big privacy issues don’t seem all that shocking. In more than 34 years of traveling regularly overseas, I have assumed that foreign intelligence services are picki

Nicaragua’s $40 billion deal with a Chinese company to build a trans-oceanic waterway that will compete with the Panama Canal will either be Latin America’s most important economic project in more than a century or the biggest government scam in the region’s history.There are many reasons to think it may be the latter. The big question, however, is why reputable U.S. consulting firms ― including McKinsey, McLarty Associates and former Transparency International anti-corruption crusader Ronald Ma

Even as he condemned Edward Snowden’s leaks about two government surveillance programs, President Obama said he welcomed the debate about whether post-9/11 efforts to detect terrorist plots have undermined Americans’ privacy. That debate has raged since the Guardian and the Washington Post published material provided by Snowden, and two things are clear:― The American public and many members of Congress were unaware of the scope of the government’s electronic surveillance programs, which include

The political storm over the released minutes of the 2007 South-North summit brings a few questions to the mind of this annoyed watcher. First, was President Roh Moo-hyun really ready to abandon the NLL or did he just mention it as a strategic rhetoric to lead his host to a meaningful negotiation on overall inter-Korean issues? Second, who gains and who loses with the exposure of the details of the dialogue between the two men who both have died? In this summer of 2013, we are confronting a whol

The state intelligence agency opened Pandora’s box when it unexpectedly disclosed Monday the controversial transcript of the 2007 inter-Korean summit in Pyongyang between President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il.The abrupt disclosure added a new twist to the already convoluted dispute over the remarks that Roh made during the summit regarding the Northern Limit Line, the de facto maritime border between the two Koreas in the West Sea.The National Intelligence Service made publi

The Financial Supervisory Services is set to launch a probe into executive compensation in the domestic banking industry as the pay of top officials at financial holding companies and banks seems not to be directly linked to performance.According to reports, KB Financial Group Inc. paid a total of 4.36 billion won last year to its chairman, Euh Yoon-dae, and its president, Lim Young-rok, with Euh’s share believed to be around 3 billion won. Euh, who is scheduled to step down next month handing o

It is remarkable to see the “Knowledge Sharing Program” grow and expand. This ODA program, jointly administered by the Ministry of Strategy and Finance and the Korea Development Institute, has suddenly become popular among developing countries, and requests to participate are piling up. This is a program in which Korea “shares” its experience of economic development with developing countries: What is provided here is Korea’s own experience since the 1960s instead of products or grants. The progr

LONDON ― Last year’s Libor scandal was a shock to the body politic in London. Despite all that had gone before, the public and their representatives were stunned to learn that bankers had systematically undermined the foundations of a global market benchmark ― one with London in its name to boot ― for personal gain. Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, felt compelled to launch a parliamentary inquiry. On June 19, after a year’s work, the Parliamentary Commission on Banking Stand

Due to the recent popularity of Korean pop culture overseas, some Koreans naively think that the whole world is crazy about anything Korean, including Korean literature. It is undeniable that these days foreigners are increasingly interested in Korean pop culture such as Korean soap operas, movies and pop songs. Unfortunately, however, few foreigners are interested in Korean literature, because literature, in general, is sought by a smaller number of people worldwide. In the past, when books wer

The suspense did not last long: Soon after his flight from Hong Kong landed in Moscow, we were told that National Security Agency whistle-blower Edward Snowden had applied for political asylum in Ecuador. It was in Hong Kong that Snowden publicly disclosed the existence of Prism, a top-secret U.S. National Security Agency program providing the NSA with access to the servers of top Internet companies like Miscrosoft, Apple, Google and Yahoo! Hong Kong has an extradition treaty with the U.S., wher

BERLIN ― Usually, people or institutions are taken to court when things go wrong and a fight ensues about who is liable for the damage. So the German Constitutional Court’s hearing on June 11-12 to consider the legality of the European Central Bank’s so-called outright monetary transactions (OMT) program was peculiar. Here is a fight over the single most successful monetary-policy measure of recent decades ― not just in Europe, but anywhere.The announcement of the OMT scheme in July 2012 reduced

NEW DELHI ― The United States, still mired in a protracted war in Afghanistan that has exacted a staggering cost in blood and treasure, will formally open peace talks with the Taliban, its main battlefield opponent, in the coming days (apparently despite last-minute opposition from Afghan President Hamid Karzai). With the U.S. determined to withdraw its forces after more than a decade of fighting, the talks in Doha, Qatar, are largely intended to allow it to do so “honorably.”How the end of U.S.

There are two widely discussed scenarios that could unfold in Washington this summer. The first, embraced by the White House and some Democrats, is upbeat: The immigration bill passes the Senate with a big margin, making it almost impossible for House Republicans to resist; more people start signing up for President Barack Obama’s health-care law, and even though no fiscal grand bargain is in the offing, an improving economy gives the president a stronger hand in dealing with Republicans on exte

The protests in Turkey, which now involve an extraordinarily diverse group of people, illuminate an altered political landscape. Yet much coverage of the demonstrations betrays an intellectual lag ― worse than the one that plagued many journalists and pundits when anti-Mubarak protesters filled Tahrir Square in 2011. Hasty proclamations of a “Turkish Spring” have given way to sophisticated-sounding but shallow dualisms, which seem to come straight from Flaubert’s “Dictionary of Received Ideas.”

Fifty million Koreans will count on the Korean National Pension Plan in their retirement years. Clearly, managing the $406 billion national pension fund in the best manner possible is one of the most critical missions of the national government, right next to national defense and economic growth. Is the Korean national pension fund being managed well? Let’s consider the quality of the national pension fund by three criteria: safety of the assets, rate of return on the portfolio, and steadiness o

SINGAPORE ― Among the stories and rumors prompted by Edward J. Snowden’s leaking of classified material ― whistleblowing or treason, depending on where you stand ― the revelations that may actually lead to a policy change concern the extent to which private companies now carry out intelligence gathering and analysis in the United States.Around a third of the 1.4 million people with “top secret” U.S. security clearances are contractors, according to the Office of the U.S. Director of National Int

PARIS ― Anyone who knows anything about the real world of intelligence and espionage knows that James Bond is a joke who wouldn’t survive his first day on the job (and not just because he’d fall asleep during static surveillance). But just try explaining to people that Agent 007 bears absolutely no resemblance to the reality of espionage profession. So it shouldn’t come as any surprise that intelligence-leaking NSA contractor Edward Snowden ― with his lack of understanding of the intelligence ap

They’re stealing from our people who are trying to help them and killing our soldiers who are trying to train them. And when called on it, they say we are lying.It’s probably no surprise that I’m talking about Afghanistan. But a new U.S. government auditors’ report puts glistening new icing on the cake.The Afghan Finance Ministry has levied nearly $1 billion in unwarranted taxes on United States aid agencies that “build roads, schools, hospitals” for the Afghan people, the auditors’ report said

There are two great centers of unaccountable power in the American political-economic system today ― places where decisions that significantly affect large numbers of Americans are made in secret, and are unchecked either by effective democratic oversight or by market competition.One goes by the name of the “intelligence community,” and its epicenter is the National Security Agency within the Defense Department. If we trusted that it reasonably balanced its snooping on Americans with our nation’