Gabrielle Giffords received a Profile in Courage award this weekend at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston. The award is fitting, though she is displaying a different kind of courage than was celebrated by the late president in his 1957 best-selling book. In 2011, the Arizona congresswoman was gravely injured when she was shot in the head by a deranged gunman at a Tucson political event, where six people were killed. Giffords has undergone an excruciating rehabilitation and had to resign her H

ABU DHABI/NEW YORK ― For a child, receiving a vaccine takes just a moment (and perhaps a few tears). But such moments are crucial for getting children off to a healthy start in life, and for advancing progress on global health and development goals.Along with Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi, we attach great importance to the world’s first global summit, being held this week in Abu Dhabi, aimed at ensuring that all children have access to the full benefits of vac

A group of unethical college prep schools in southern Seoul has brought shame on the nation by allegedly helping students who were preparing to get into U.S. universities cheat on the Scholastic Aptitude Test.They are suspected of having provided students with SAT questions, which they have obtained through illegal means. This has led the U.S. College Board, a nonprofit organization that administers the exam, to cancel the May test in Korea, which was slated for last Saturday.Korea has fallen in

The main opposition Democratic Party, which was called the Democratic United Party until last week, has elected Rep. Kim Han-gil as its new leader. By picking a non-mainstreamer as its new chairman, the party held the fractious mainstream faction accountable for the successive election defeats it has suffered since last April.The Saturday leadership election was a two-way race between Kim, a seasoned politician in his fourth term as lawmaker, and Rep. Lee Yong-sup, the unified candidate of the m

If you’re looking for someone to loathe, I have a strong candidate to offer: Richard Falk, the United Nations Human Rights Council’s “special rapporteur” for the Palestinians.Falk has pursued a long and, shall I say, controversial career since he retired from Princeton University 12 years ago. But he capped it off last week when he wrote that victims of the Boston Marathon bombing had it coming because the United States is “a menace to the world and to itself.” He added: “Should we not all be me

PARIS ― In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, it’s only natural to ask why some terrorists are only caught after they’ve inflicted carnage on innocent civilians. What went wrong?Here are a few significant reasons why authorities still manage to miss terrorism until it’s too late:1. It doesn’t help that U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper understated the threat when he told Congress in March that counterterrorism efforts “have degraded core al-Qaida to a point that the grou

LONDON ― As Syria’s civil war has progressed, the West’s views on arming the opposition have become increasingly confused, which reflects the growing muddle on the ground. While President Bashar al-Assad’s regime remains vicious and tyrannical, and some of its opponents’ motives remain altruistic, the conflict can no longer be defined simply as one of good versus evil.No unified, patriotic Syrian opposition has existed since extremists hijacked the peaceful protests in 2011. Indeed, some opposit

NEW DELHI ― Stoking tensions with Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines over islands in the South and East China Seas has not prevented an increasingly assertive China from opening yet another front by staging a military incursion across the disputed, forbidding Himalayan frontier. On the night of April 15, a People’s Liberation Army platoon stealthily intruded near the China-India-Pakistan tri-junction, established a camp 19 kilometers inside Indian-controlled territory, and presented India’s gove

The accomplishments of the first 100 days in office are a favorite benchmark for democratic leaders. It’s thought to offer a preview of his or her worldview, ambition and political fortune. So, viewed through this lens, just how is Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe doing? Abe’s 100-day mark came and went on April 4, the same day his new Bank of Japan governor shocked markets with one of the most aggressive monetary jolts in history. Suddenly, Japan was in the international news for the right re

The Boston Marathon bombing has brought out the xenophobes.Often when America suffers some large, inexplicable tragedy, we want to blame “foreigners” and look for ways to fortify ourselves against them. It’s more reassuring to believe that an evil lies outside our borders ― in “them” ― than to face the possibility that it’s randomly among us.And like the communist scare before it, the so-called “war on terror” ― a war without end ― offers a convenient means of targeting the source as a foreign m

NEW YORK ― At the conclusion of their summit in Durban in March, the leaders of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) announced their intention to establish a New Development Bank aimed at “mobilizing resources for infrastructure and sustainable development projects in BRICS and other emerging economies and developing countries.”The significance of this decision cannot be overemphasized. For starters, it reflects the enormous successes in economic development during the last

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving, younger brother accused in the Boston bombings, migrated from Russia to America at the age of 8. Seung-hui Cho, who committed the Virginia Tech massacre, migrated from South Korea to the U.S. at the age of 8. I also immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 8. It reminds me that we have many troubled young men in our country, and that Tsarnaev could have been anyone’s son, brother or friend. I was disappointed by news reports that some ethnic Chechens in Boston and e

Many people have at some point in their lives experienced the curious condition of being unable to tell whether they were awake or still asleep. Some may do so while encountering a talking cat on their way back from an evening of heavy drinking, but such experiences are far more common, one may guess, on a Monday morning while chained to your desk. This perhaps explains our deep fascination with zombie movies; there is always something slightly uplifting about seeing a colleague or a neighbor a

The National Election Commission has come up with a set of proposals to change the nation’s election culture, which it described as overly restrictive. The election watchdog says its proposals are geared toward enhancing the freedom of candidates and voters to express their political views. True, the nation’s election regulations are too rigid. They specify the official campaign period and ban most campaign activities before it. These restrictions, however, are intended to ensure a level playing

President Park Geun-hye reminded many of her father when she presided over a meeting on trade and investment at Cheong Wa Dae on Wednesday. Attended by corporate CEOs as well as ministers, the high-profile session was designed to resolve problems that hamper exports and investment.The troubleshooting meeting was modeled after the monthly export promotion meetings that former President Park Chung-hee had held from 1965 to 1979. Through these meetings, the late president sought to remove the obsta

By now, you’re probably tired of all the back-and-forth on Reinhart and Rogoff. That would be Harvard University’s Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, the economists who co-authored the 2009 best-seller, “This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Follies,” and who are now on the firing line because of minor data errors in a 2010 working paper. That paper, “Growth in a Time of Debt,” found that high public debt was associated with slower growth. Specifically, when a nation’s gross publ

WASHINGTON ― America’s top intelligence official said Thursday there isn’t any evidence so far that the Boston Marathon bombers had help from foreign terrorist networks. “At this point I haven’t seen anything that raises a concern there was a bigger plot, but we’re still investigating,” said James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, in an interview. He was responding to a query about a recent newspaper story citing two Russian militants as possible accomplices. Clapper’s comments are

The main opposition party is set to change its name from the Democratic United Party back to its previous one, the Democratic Party, at its upcoming national convention on Saturday, which speaks volumes about the precarious state in which it is placed.To reflect its of forging alliances with the Federation of Korean Trade Unions and progressive activist groups led by diehard supporters of former President Roh Moo-hyun, the main opposition changed its name in late 2011. The shift to the left was

The settlement of a dispute over the withdrawal of South Korean companies from the North Korean border town of Gaeseong may become messy, given that the North Koreans are notoriously tenacious in making unreasonable demands in negotiations, as witnessed time and again in the past.As the South Korean unification minister says, however, yielding to undue demands is out of the question this time. Still, North Korea can have its way if it decides to confiscate all assets that the departing companies

In 1999, President Bill Clinton set out to right a wrong: the government’s widespread discrimination against black farmers, particularly in the South. The victims had applied for farming loans but, owing to bias on the part of federal loan officers, had been rejected. Faced with 1,000 claims in a class-action lawsuit, the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to pay $50,000 to each claimant to settle the matter. “It’s a tremendous victory for black farmers across the nation,” exulted John Boyd J