On debt crisis, Obama makes direct appeal to U.S. public: ‘We are all in this together’WASHINGTON (AP) ― President Barack Obama appealed for public support Saturday to push Congress to avert an unprecedented default on America’s national debt as lawmakers worked on dual tracks to reach an elusive deal.Obama wants lawmakers to approve a giant package that would not only prevent a default by raising

When you read last week that terrorists have discussed surgically implanting explosives in passengers so they could blow up airliners, did you feel a little less aggrieved about the TSA agents who supposedly patted down a 95-year-old woman in a wheelchair?That patdown was a late-June outrage du jour about the Transportation Security Administration. The story: The elderly woman was patted down and,

Japan’s Foreign Ministry has perplexed us by ordering its officials not to use Korean Air for a month starting today. The reason for this ban was a demonstration flight the private airliner recently conducted with its newly introduced Airbus A380 over Dokdo, Korea’s easternmost islets.One may wonder why the Japanese ministry instructed a boycott of the Korean carrier for test flying its newest pas

South Korea and China have agreed to restore bilateral military relations, which have remained sour following North Korea’s torpedoing of the South’s warship Cheonan in March last year and subsequent shelling of Yeonpyeong Island in October. The agreement was reached between Defense Minister Kim Kwan-jin and his Chinese counterpart Liang Guanglie during their talks in Beijing on Friday.According t

The months ahead in 2011 will constitute a summer to remember for a long, long time.The world’s two largest economies ― the United States and Europe ― are drifting toward brutal days of reckoning. Both economies face severe financial and economic challenges.Failure by either or both would send severe shocks through the already limping global economy. In the United States, a fiercely aroused but in

Everyone knows you can train a dog by rewarding the behavior you want Rover to repeat. But Barack Obama has always been ambitious, so he trains Republicans. The behavior he rewards is intransigence. Every time congressional Republicans adopt an inflexible position ― such as their current no-tax-hikes stance in negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling ― the president rewards them with a t

The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade.Every other sort ― no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up ― is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable. That’s the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of t

CARACAS (AP) ― Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez delegated some of his duties to his vice president and finance minister on Saturday as he prepared to fly to Cuba to start chemotherapy and a new stage of cancer treatment.Chavez had refused opposition demands that he temporarily cede power to Vice President Elias Jaua while undergoing chemotherapy in Havana. But shortly after a legislative vote appr