Last year, a Vietnamese woman involved in a divorce from her South Korean husband left the country with their 13-month-old child and traveled back to Vietnam. Her husband pressed criminal charges against her for kidnapping and each successive court found her not guilty. Eventually the case reached the South Korean Supreme Court and the court, in its first live broadcast, heard the case. At the time choosing such a case for the very first live broadcast was roundly criticized for feeding into the

You may have heard that Justice Antonin Scalia referred to the majority opinion striking down the Defense of Marriage Act as “legalistic argle-bargle.” Intemperate as the dissent was, derision for Justice Anthony Kennedy’s jurisprudence of dignity and personhood was nothing new for Scalia, who has been castigating what he once called Kennedy’s “sweet mystery of life” rhetoric for a decade. What’s new about Scalia’s numerous dissents issued over the U.S. Supreme Court’s remarkable June is how muc

It’s a parent’s nightmare: shelling out big money for college, then seeing the graduate unable to land a job that requires high-level skills. This situation may be growing more common, unfortunately, because the demand for cognitive skills associated with higher education, after rising sharply until 2000, has since been in decline. So concludes new research by economists Paul Beaudry and David Green of the University of British Columbia and Benjamin Sand of York University in Toronto. This rever

Korea Water Resources Corp. is set to take legal action against Korean environmental activists who recently made misleading allegations against it in Thailand. The company is on the brink of winning two water management contracts there with a combined value of 6.1 trillion won.The state-run corporation heads a Korean consortium that was chosen on June 10 as the preferred bidder for two key components of the 11.5 trillion-won megaproject promoted by the Thai government to prevent the Chao Phraya

President Park Geun-hye has wrapped up her highly successful visit to China. During the four-day trip, she has captured the hearts and minds of the Chinese, laying the groundwork for enhanced ties between the two neighbors in the next 20 years.Before leaving for China, Park described her visit as “a journey of hearts and trust.” The description well summed up the main objective of her trip to China: She sought to bond the peoples of the two countries together with trust.Park has built her relati

NEW YORK ― Fifty years ago, President John F. Kennedy did the seemingly impossible. At the height of the Cold War, he moved the two nuclear superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, toward peace. The lessons of Kennedy’s act of leadership ― one of the greatest of modern times ― are directly relevant today.I recount this remarkable story in a new book, “To Move the World.” To many, war between the two superpowers seemed inevitable. The Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 created a glo

NEW YORK ― In recent years, a growing number of African governments have issued Eurobonds, diversifying away from traditional sources of finance such as concessional debt and foreign direct investment. Taking the lead in October 2007, when it issued a $750 million Eurobond with an 8.5 percent coupon rate, Ghana earned the distinction of being the first Sub-Saharan country ― other than South Africa ― to issue bonds in 30 years.This debut Sub-Saharan issue, which was four times oversubscribed, spa

The State Department issued a new travel advisory last week for a neighbor state, Honduras, warning potential American visitors that they risk being kidnapped or killed. What’s more, it said, if they face a problem, the police may not even show up.If you do go, the advisory added, lock your car doors so robbers or kidnappers can’t burst in at traffic lights. Eighteen Americans have been killed there in the last two years. Police have arrested no one for any of those crimes.By now, many people kn

WASHINGTON ― For an illustration of why the federal government has become so unmanageable, consider the Air Force’s attempt last year to cut its budget by retiring unneeded warplanes. This sensible policy ran into a shredder ― largely because of the political clout of the Air National Guard and the Air Force Reserve.Governors united across party lines to protest the potential loss of their pet C-130s and other planes. Members of Congress lined up behind the potent lobbying pressure of the Guard

MUNICH ― Germany’s Constitutional Court is preparing what might become the most important decision in its history. Last September, the court allowed the German government to sign the Treaty Establishing the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the eurozone’s permanent intergovernmental rescue facility. Now, however, it may try to stop the European Central Bank’s so-called outright monetary transactions (OMT) program (the ECB’s pledge to buy, without limit, the government bonds of troubled eurozon

Australia has been called many things: Oz; the land Down Under; the lucky country. But the equivalent of a collateralized-debt obligation? Canberra can’t be happy to hear its AAA-rated economy likened to one of the reviled investment vehicles that blew up amid the 2008 global crisis. Yet the comparison is being made by some economists, who see the asset underlying Australia ― demand from China ― beginning to evaporate. No country is more vulnerable to the much-dreaded slowdown in China than reso

Following the dramatic news of the U.S. National Security Agency’s extensive surveillance operations, several organizations and journalists turned to George Orwell’s novel “Nineteen Eighty-Four” in an attempt to find suitable words to describe the situation. The American Civil Liberties Union labeled the case “beyond Orwellian,” while numerous newspaper editorials worldwide made references to the acclaimed novel. Amazon recently reported that sales of “Nineteen Eighty-Four” had gone up 9,538 per

President Park Geun-hye, now on a four-day visit to China, had talks with her counterpart Xi Jinping on Thursday, which covered North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, regional security, bilateral economic ties and many other issues. Their agreements will undoubtedly serve as guidelines for South Korea’s relations with China during the next five years of her governance, if not longer. Her selection of Beijing over Tokyo as her second destination for summit diplomacy after Washington speaks volumes abou

It is not unusual for a university faculty member to curry favor with a political party or a political leader. He is willing to sell his academic expertise for his political ambition. He is rightly called a “polifessor,” a derogative term combining politician and professor.Some polifessors may play constructive roles in pursuit of their personal interests. For instance, they may provide political leaders and their parties with ingenious, yet sound advice in crafting policies.But many others do h

PARIS ― “A traitor is always useful,” a Russian security service friend said to me while discussing NSA contractor turned defector Edward Snowden’s arrival in his country.Snowden has fallen into the open arms of Mother Russia, where he was greeted at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport by a Russian security service contingent. The plan reportedly was for Snowden to pass through Russia en route to another country, after sharing America’s stolen secrets with Hong Kong authorities. As luck would have it,

JERUSALEM ― “Europe is boring: thank God, for you and for us,” my interlocutor told me. “Today, drama is in the Middle East, growth is in Asia, hope is in Africa, and proximity to the United States is in Latin America. Europe is nowhere ― it has become the lost continent.”There is, of course, a little provocation and a lot of irony in these remarks. A few years ago, their speaker occupied important positions within U.S. diplomacy; he is now a key figure of the New York establishment. And his pro

The dispute over the transcript of the 2007 summit between President Roh Moo-hyun and North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has taken a new turn as allegations surfaced that the document was illegally leaked to some ruling party lawmakers before the December presidential election.The allegations were first put forward by Rep. Park Beom-kye, a lawmaker of the main opposition Democratic Party. Park claimed that the Saenuri Party’s presidential campaign team had planned to use the controversial summit mi

The government has unveiled its economic management plan for the second half. As expected, it raised its economic growth forecast for this year to 2.7 percent from the 2.3 percent projected in March.The plan also forecasts the economy to add 300,000 new jobs this year, up from the previously projected 250,000 but much fewer than last year’s gain of 440,000. Consumer prices were forecast to rise 1.7 percent, slower than the previous projection of 2.3 percent, while current account surpluses were

The word “dignity” can’t be found in the Constitution, but in his majority opinion in U.S. v. Windsor, Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy uses it no fewer than nine times (actually 10, if we include “indignity”). The foundation of the court’s opinion, and its real importance, lie in its insistence on human dignity as a constitutional value, one that stands at the heart of our longstanding commitment to equal protection of the laws. In Windsor, the court struck down a central provision of the

It’s as if they didn’t learn a thing from the 2012 elections. Republicans are on the same suicide mission as before ― trying to block immigration reform (if they can’t scuttle it in the Senate, they’re ready to in the House), roll back the clock on abortion rights (they’re pushing federal and state legislation to ban abortions after the first 22 weeks) and stop gay marriage wherever possible.As almost everyone knows by now, this puts them on the wrong side of history. America is becoming more et