How far student speech has come since Mary Beth and John Tinker and Christopher Eckhardt wore black armbands to school in Des Moines to protest the Vietnam War and got suspended as though they were common hooligans.Now, online-savvy teens get in trouble for rudely mocking their elders on social networking sites, and the ensuing court battles rattle and redefine free-speech boundaries.In Tinker v.

Many Americans probably wonder why President Obama didn’t call for a bigger troop pullout from Afghanistan.Having recently returned from Afghanistan and Pakistan, I think he could have made a stronger case for his decision to bring home only 10,000 troops by the end of this year. (The rest of the 33,000 “surge” troops he has deployed will return no later than September 2012, with a full transition

June, the “Month of National Protection,” is passing with public and private events to evoke the people’s determination to fight whatever enemy threatens national independence. Media special features around Memorial Day on the 6th and the Korean War anniversary on the 25th reminded Koreans of who they are indebted to for what the Republic of Korea is today and how they should prepare themselves to

Officials of the Ministry of Homeland and Maritime Affairs in charge of the Four Rivers Development Project, the local authorities along the rivers and millions of residents are anxiously watching the water levels rising in this rainy spell. They all fear possible damage to the embankments, dikes and bridges built over the past couple years under President Lee Myung-bak’s signature project.The yea

Three years ago, the last graduating class of the “old” Locke High School listened to a commencement speaker whose main thrust was that only a small number of students had made it to that point. Odd words at most graduation ceremonies, but appropriate at Locke. Under the management of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the number of graduates at this public school in Watts was regularly a fr

The Communist Party of China has coined and promoted many slogans from Mao Zedong’s time to the present day. A slogan-driven regime treats its people simultaneously as morons and a dangerous rabble. Mao said that China’s people were “poor and blank” and one could write beautiful things on a blank sheet of paper.In other words, Mao wanted to write his own script on this blank sheet of paper after h

The presidential office is at odds with the ruling Grand National Party, which is abandoning much of its conservative tenet ahead of next year’s elections. But it has few tools to use against the move.Fatigue is settling among presidential aides, who find it virtually impossible to force the party to toe the line, unlike at the outset of President Lee Myung-bak’s administration. They apparently fe

President Lee Myung-bak is meeting Rep. Sohn Hak-kyu, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, on Monday morning. They are set to discuss six agenda items at the breakfast talks, which their aides expect to last for about two hours.The agenda items are: a cut in university tuition fees, a corruption scandal involving savings banks, an early ratification of the Korean-U.S. free trade agreeme

President Barack Obama will want Americans to see his announcement of upcoming U.S. troop withdrawals from Afghanistan as proof that we are defeating the Taliban. But for many, his decision will only confirm that 10 years of war, more than 1,600 American lives and $444 billion of taxpayer money have been wasted. The verdict need not be so dire. It is possible to get to an acceptable outcome, but o

President Obama announced Wednesday night the size of the withdrawal from Afghanistan after a bruising internal debate within the administration. Proponents of a fast, immediate drawdown have been making essentially two arguments, neither especially compelling.There is the fiscal argument: We can’t afford the cost of the war effort. It’s true that we are facing a budget crunch, but the savings fro