President Barack Obama’s budget proposal Monday all but seals the deal: Together, Washington Democrats and Republicans have stopped governing. Both parties now are on automatic pilot. They’ll do as little as possible to solve this nation’s debt crisis before Nov. 6. Instead they’ll wait to see whether American voters firmly choose a direction for the United States and its destructive indebtedness.How destructive? Conveniently, one of this nation’s plausible futures plays out vividly on a TV scre

Japanese authorities have decided not to allow a right-wing organization to erect stone monuments of “Takeshima” in front of the Korean Embassy in Tokyo and its consulate general in Osaka, Yonhap News and SBS TV reported, quoting official sources in Seoul. The reports revealed that Japanese officials intimated their Korean counterparts about the decision which is inadequate to be officially announced.A Japanese group called “the Society of Citizens Recognizing No Privileges of Foreigners in Japa

With his approval rating rising to over 50 percent this week, U.S. President Barack Obama told visiting Chinese top leader-in-waiting Xi Jinping that Washington welcomes China’s “peaceful rise” but cautioned him about friction over trade and human rights issues as the economic and military rivalry grows between the two countries.While the Chinese vice president was seeking to boost his international standing with his four-day visit to the United States, it offered U.S. leaders to size up the man

Recently in Bangkok, I found myself wandering through the strange but distinctive arena for one of Asia’s latest conflicts: CentralWorld, supposedly the biggest shopping mall in Southeast Asia. Protesters supporting Thaksin Shinawatra, Thailand’s populist ex-prime minister, had set up base camp in the mall’s plaza in May 2010. During a widely covered clash with security forces, they had set the building on fire, destroying much of it. The newly renovated mall ― and the traffic outside, restored

In 1982, I interviewed Syrian Information Minister Ahmed Iskander in Damascus, shortly after the regime had killed at least 10,000 people in the city of Hama.On his office wall hung a painting of an old Hama neighborhood with one of the waterwheels for which the city was famous. “That is our lovely city of Hama,” he told me calmly. “It’s perfectly peaceful. You should visit it someday.”He knew that I knew this neighborhood had been leveled to the ground.Back then, under the regime of Hafez al-As

President Barack Obama‘s budget proposal Monday all but seals the deal: Together, Washington Democrats and Republicans have stopped governing. Both parties now are on automatic pilot. They’ll do as little as possible to solve this nation‘s debt crisis before Nov. 6. Instead they’ll wait to see whether American voters firmly choose a direction for the United States and its destructive indebtedness.How destructive? Conveniently, one of this nation‘s plausible futures plays out vividly on a TV scre

The United States is set to hold talks with North Korea in Beijing next Thursday, the third of their kind aimed at restarting the stalled six-nation negotiations on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program. As a U.S. State Department spokeswoman put it, the talks are “a continuation of the meetings” that the United States has been holding with an evasive, cunning North Korea to see if it is prepared to fulfill its past commitments to denuclearization. Given the remarks, the United States does not a

Political parties have no qualms about making untenable pledges ahead of the April 11 general elections if they are believed to endear them to the electorate. A case in point is a promise to build a new airport in the southeast, which is shaping up to be one of the fiercest battle grounds.The proposal to build a new airport in the area, originally a campaign promise of President Lee Myung-bak, was scrapped when a feasibility study concluded last year that it would incur heavy losses if its const

The rest of the country may be tiring of it, but the drawn-out, high-decibel battle for the Republican presidential nomination is just fine with the Obama campaign.Why? Because the president’s strategists still expect to be facing Mitt Romney in the general election, and his unexpectedly tough fight to sew up the nomination has forced him to keep emphasizing his credentials as a conservative instead of moving toward the center, where the swing voters are.“The long primary fight is driving indepe