A Washington Post/ABC News poll this week says 70 percent of Americans think the Republican Party is out of touch.The same poll found that 86 percent of Americans ― and 84 percent of those who call themselves Republicans ― support requiring background checks on gun purchases made at gun shows or over the Internet. On Wednesday, a measure that would do exactly that was stopped in the U.S. Senate after gaining the support of only four Republicans.Any questions?That shameful disconnect defeated the

A plague of locusts swept through Egypt a few weeks ago, an estimated 30 million of the critters.Egyptian officials tried to downplay the phenomenon, hoping to quash any biblical analogies. They noted that locust swarms show up in the spring every now and then. But more earthly indicators suggest that the blighted Egyptian government is in such deep political and economic trouble that perhaps the analogy is apt.Experts and senior government officials worldwide are warning that Egypt’s economy is

The government has submitted its proposal for a supplementary budget to the National Assembly, hoping for an early passage so that it can inject fresh vigor into the economy. Given the sorry state of the economy, a supplementary budget should have been created much earlier. But the new administration had been held back by a long standoff between rival parties over government reorganization.Now, lawmakers need to rush to handle the bill to give the economy a much-needed boost without further dela

The concept of economic democratization remains as elusive as ever. The vagueness of the concept lies at the center of the ongoing controversy over the proposals under discussion at the National Assembly to promote economic democracy.Some of the proposals have triggered a strong backlash from big business groups as they call for penalizing related-party transactions, a practice prevalent among chaebol groups.For instance, one idea proposes to hold a chaebol chairman accountable, even if there is

ISTANBUL ― Conflict in the Middle East threatens not only the security of many of its states, but also their continued existence. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and others, now gripped by sectarian fighting, risk fragmenting into ethnic sub-states, transforming a region whose political geography was drawn nearly a century ago.Surveying the regional scene, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has conceived of an audacious plan to enhance Turkey’s regional standing and extend his own political domin

This week will see the Korean Association of International Studies and the Korea Foundation host an international conference on the role of middle powers in the 21st century. The significance of the conference being held in South Korea is twofold ― it marks Korea’s prominence as a source of innovative and influential scholarship on middlepowerism, and it marks Korea’s growing acceptance of middlepowerism as a national role.Korea is a late entrant into the middle-power category. At the end of Wor

WASHINGTON ― “Nothing broken but my heart,” was the subject line on an email from one of the Boston Marathon runners to his friends Monday night after the bombs had detonated near the finish line. And every American shared some of that trauma as a classic sporting ritual was turned into a scene of mayhem. As the FBI and Boston police gathered evidence Tuesday, a preliminary picture emerged: The two bombs were rudimentary “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs, left on the ground and detonated b

Sportswriters exist in a kind of creative tension. Pulling us in one direction is the desire to draw deeper meaning from the events we cover. Pulling us in the other is the realization that sportswriting isn’t social commentary. So we tend to see the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team’s gold medal as a triumph of democracy over communism, or the Iraqi national soccer team’s advancing to the semifinals of the 2004 Olympic Games as a metaphor for the resilience of an oppressed, war-ravaged people. Mean

Twice in the past two years, I met two Apache helicopter crews at the Gyeonggi Provincial Office during Ulchi Focus Lens exercises. On the ground, the crew members explained the anti-armor aircraft to visitors. The crew even lifted a great number of children into the cockpits ― tirelessly, again and again, for four days. I found this to be touching. In thick combat uniforms and boots, they sweated like pigs, but their work served as a good opportunity to make the U.S. armed forces more familiar

“Boston bombings shatter a national sense of safety,” read one headline this morning. “A perfect Marathon day, then the unimaginable,” read another. These summations were plausible enough, because yesterday’s attack was the first successful strike against a U.S. city since Sept. 11, 2001. A national security official from the George W. Bush administration expressed the same thought in even more dramatic terms. “In some ways,” Juan Carlos Zarate said, “this ruptures the psyche.” Plausible ― but n

Providence made me a citizen of the Republic of Korea. I lived under the rule of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for three months during the Korean War. But afterward I was blessed to be on the southern side of the line that divides the Korean Peninsula in two. Sometimes, I find myself drifting in the fantasy of living on the other side of the line by some vagary of God’s will.My wife is a refugee from North Korea. Her family, whose ancestors lived for centuries in Hwanghae Province, s

The Korean economy is like a frog in a pot of slowly boiling water. It is in grave danger but the Korean people do not perceive it.So warn the analysts of McKinsey & Company who have recently written a report on Korea. Titled “Beyond Korean Style: Shaping a New Growth Formula,” the report urges Korea to retool the economy before it is too late.Fifteen years ago, the global management consulting firm issued its first report on Korea. At the time, it focused on the excessive debt of large corporat

The government is reportedly planning to allow each member of provincial and metropolitan councils to employ an aide paid for by local residents. Minister of Security and Public Administration Yoo Jeong-bok said the government would push to revise the law on local autonomy to implement the plan within this year.Yoo justified the move by saying that “local councilors deserve better working conditions as they deal with budgets amounting to trillions of won and carry out numerous tasks directly rel

While largely unnoticed under the stack of North Korea-related news, an alarming and embarrassing report has been released. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the U.S. Department of Commerce submitted its 2013 report to U.S. Congress, in which it had designated 10 countries as having engaged in IUU fishing activities: Colombia, Ecuador, Ghana, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Spain, Tanzania, Venezuela and South Korea. IUU is an acronym for Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated fishing a

The bird-flu virus that suddenly started killing people last month in China is unquestionably a “serious human health risk,” as the scientists who discovered it have reported in the New England Journal of Medicine. H7N9 contains gene sequences that make it relatively effective, for a bird virus, at infecting humans and other mammals. People don’t appear to have natural immunity, there’s no vaccine, and so far about one in five known to have caught the virus have died. Fears grew as 11 more infec

When a tragic incident or disaster happens, we all wish we could go back in time to prevent the unfortunate incident from unfolding. There are a number of American movies that precisely portray such fantasies. “Deja Vu,” for example, implicitly reflects the American people’s secret wish to time-travel and alter disastrous events such as 9/11. “Retroactive,” deals more explicitly with the theme of returning to the past to prevent a murder. “Back to the Future,” too, comically depicts the protagon

What to do about Kim Jong-un, the world’s greatest showman, who is noisily threatening a nuclear war on the Korean peninsula and preparing to test a missile that could reach Guam?Politicians and pundits are furiously debating the answer, but I’ve heard no ideas likely to persuade North Korea’s twenty-something leader to behave better. That is, until Tuesday, when a prominent South Korean legislator suggested a response that would be bitterly opposed by Washington (and Beijing and Pyongyang).I co

With Iran nuclear talks fizzling and North Korea threatening to turn Seoul into a sea of fire, it took political courage for U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to go before Congress this week with a 2014 defense budget that cut money for missile defense programs. Yet, in our eyes, the real problem is that the $500 million in trims was merely cosmetic. A deeper slice into the $10 billion the Pentagon spends each year on such programs wouldn’t make the U.S. one iota less safe, and would help with

It was raining heavily last week when I visited Tokyo’s controversial Yasukuni Shrine, which commemorates Japanese who died in the “imperial cause.” But the tour buses still discharged scores of elderly Japanese visitors, and I received approving looks and even a faint smile from two Japanese women as we stood in the rain before the memorial to an Indian jurist called Radha Binod Pal. Pal was the only Indian judge at the so-called Tokyo Trials, Japan’s protracted version of Nuremberg. In his 1,2

KHARKIV, UKRAINE ― Prison is always a place of mourning. But perhaps learning of Margaret Thatcher’s death in this place is grimly appropriate, because it made me remember the imprisoned society of my youth that Thatcher did so much to set free. For many of us who grew up in the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe, Margaret Thatcher will always be a heroine. Not only did she espouse the cause of freedom ― particularly economic freedom ― in Britain and the West; by proclaiming Mikha