The downfall of former Chongqing party boss Bo Xilai has thrown the spotlight on China’s political elite and their increasing foreign connections.Bo’s political fate was sealed after his wife Gu Kailai was named as a suspect in the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, who had business ties with the family and helped Bo’s son gain admission to prestigious schools in Britain.Unlike the cloistered China of yesteryear, many top Chinese politicians and their families now have overseas links. F

PARIS ― Rousseau versus Hobbes: on the cover of the French magazine Philosophie, the two leading contenders in France’s upcoming presidential election, the incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy and the Socialist candidate Francois Hollande, are dressed up accordingly. “The real presidential contest” according to the magazine, pits the consensual and contractual vision of Rousseau (Hollande) against the violent “every man is a wolf to his fellow man” vision of Hobbes (Sarkozy).Philospophie’s take on the Fren

In a letter from 1939 to then U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the wake of Germany’s pursuit of uranium-based weapons, Albert Einstein advised the president to secure a supply of uranium ore for the U.S. and expedite the country’s nuclear experiment. Through a series of processes, Einstein’s advice led to the Manhattan Project, which conducted the first nuclear-bomb test. But after knowing that the use of nuclear bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki had caused unprecedented horror in terms

The latest round of negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program between Iran and the so-called “5+1” group (the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members -- the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, France, and China -- plus Germany) has now begun. Following more than a year of deadlock, after negotiations in January 2011 led nowhere, this dialogue is for many the last chance to find a peaceful solution to a nearly decade-long conflict (in which I participated closely from 2006 to

The Ministry of Health and Welfare has recently revised a regulation on daycare services to ensure that working moms and families with multiple children have priority in enrolling their toddlers at daycare facilities. The measure was necessitated by a surge in demand for daycare services for children aged 0-2 years. Starting March, the government expanded its subsidy program for children under 24 months old. Previously, the subsidy was given to families in the bottom 70 percent of the income lad

The U.N. Security Council acted with unusual swiftness when it condemned North Korea on Monday for launching a long-range rocket. It took just three days for the council to toughen sanctions against the rogue regime for violating its previous resolutions. While the council’s response was timely, it lacked teeth needed to deter the wayward regime from making further provocations. On Tuesday, the North “resolutely and totally” rejected the council’s unanimous statement, asserting that it ignored i

In his first public speech yesterday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un praised his father Kim Jong-il’s “military first” policy. He was speaking during celebrations to mark the 100th birthday of his late grandfather and North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung.But the hard truth for the impoverished country is that the regime’s recent missteps have served only to aggravate its isolation.Defying warnings from the global community, Pyongyang conducted its third satellite launch last Friday. The blast-off

BOSTON ― Saving the euro, say the sages of the global economy, requires radical steps. The OECD recently called for a large European firewall ― a mega-bailout fund for troubled governments and banks. Others argue for integrating taxes and borrowing in the eurozone and shedding weak members, like Greece, that struggle with a strong currency. But tall firewalls, fiscal union, or homogeneity of membership are neither necessary nor desirable. What is needed are mechanisms that recognize and accommod

Forget Europe’s debt disaster for a moment and look instead at a few numbers that dramatize the underlying problem. Unemployment in the euro area just climbed to a record of almost 11 percent. Do we blame the financial crisis and its aftermath? Europe didn’t do much better before 2008. Even before the crash, the jobless rate was stuck at between 7 percent and 8 percent, not exactly full employment. So Europe’s problem is older than the fall of the House of Lehman. Now slice the data another way.

At the risk of using one too many Annie references (which is to say, one), it’s natural, upon becoming aware of the hard-knock life which orphans face, to suggest that someone should help them. Most of the time, however, this “someone” means “someone else,” whether it be the government, corporations, rich people, or simply “anyone but me.”Such was not the reaction of Joohwan Baek, who, upon becoming aware of the challenges faced by Korean orphans, as well as the barriers facing foreigners who wi

“It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz,” the German philosopher and critic Theodor W. Adorno wrote in 1949. Adorno wanted to point out that Auschwitz presented a dilemma to writers: on the one hand, they were called upon to articulate and represent an event that could not be passed over in silence. Silence itself seemed to border on the criminal. On the other hand, to articulate the horror of an event like the Holocaust possibly exceeded what could legitimately be expressed in language.

At the risk of using one too many Annie references (which is to say, one), it’s natural, upon becoming aware of the hard-knock life which orphans face, to suggest that someone should help them. Most of the time, however, this “someone” means “someone else,” whether it be the government, corporations, rich people, or simply “anyone but me.”Such was not the reaction of Joohwan Baek, who, upon becoming aware of the challenges faced by Korean orphans, as well as the barriers facing foreigners who wi

Forget Europe’s debt disaster for a moment and look instead at a few numbers that dramatize the underlying problem. Unemployment in the euro area just climbed to a record of almost 11 percent. Do we blame the financial crisis and its aftermath? Europe didn’t do much better before 2008. Even before the crash, the jobless rate was stuck at between 7 percent and 8 percent, not exactly full employment. So Europe’s problem is older than the fall of the House of Lehman. Now slice the data another way.

In his first public speech yesterday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un praised his father Kim Jong-il’s "military first" policy. He was speaking during celebrations to mark the 100th birthday of his late grandfather and North Korea‘s founder Kim Il-sung.But the hard truth for the impoverished country is that the regime’s recent missteps have served only to aggravate its isolation.Defying warnings from the global community, Pyongyang conducted its third satellite launch last Friday. The blast-off

Anyone who says you can get rich through gambling is a fool or a knave. Multiply the size of the prize by your chance of winning it and you’ll always get a number far lower than what you put into the pot. The only sure winners are the organizers ― casino owners, state lotteries and con artists of all kinds.Yet America is now opening the floodgates to organized gambling.In December, the Department of Justice announced it was reversing its position that all Internet gambling was illegal.That decis

By now you’ve likely heard about the infamous Las Vegas convention bash during which federal civil servants at the General Services Administration indulged in various frivolities to the tune of $823,000 of your money. That conference featured, among other things, a hired professional clown ― which is like Picasso hiring some guy from out of the Yellow Pages to paint a mural.As with political sex scandals, nothing vaults a fiscal scandal into the headlines faster than photographic or video eviden

Guenter Grass, the German writer and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, brought forth last week an odious little poem that focuses on the threat to world peace posed by the Jewish state, and congratulates its author for the courage to point out this truth. The poem, published in the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung and elsewhere, was titled “What Must Be Said,” which is quite a vainglorious title. There is very little in the world that is safer (or less novel) than criticizing Isra

TOKYO ― A year has now passed since the complete core melt down of three boiling water reactors at Tokyo Electric Power Company’s Fukushima No.1 plant. Because of the limited information issued by the Japanese government ― and its insistence that the disaster was only a result of the unanticipated magnitude of the earthquake and tsunami ― the world does not know what really happened and will thus draw the wrong lessons.The most critical lesson for the global nuclear industry to learn, since most

NEW YORK ― On April 13, Iran is scheduled to meet with representatives of China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States ― the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council ― plus Germany (the so-called “P5+1”) in an effort to decide the fate of Iran’s nuclear program. Meanwhile, North Korea is reportedly preparing its third nuclear test, as if to provide a discordant sound track for the talks.If the talks fail, and military action against Iran becomes more likely, n

Ever since Islamists took office in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, they have been trying to convince us that they are advocates of moderation, democracy, women’s rights and individual freedoms. And most people in the West, after jubilantly watching the Arab Spring’s amazing revolutions last year, wanted to believe them.But now we can see that these Islamic groups are taking us for fools.In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood promised that it would not field a candidate for president. But then this month it