It didn’t take long for well-meaning members of Congress last week to come up with an easy sounding proposal to help the Libyan opposition topple Moammar Gadhafi: Just impose a no-fly zone.“We spend $500 billion on defense and we can’t take down Libyan air defenses?” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Washington Post. “You tell those Libyan pilots that there is a no-fly zone, and they are not goi

Economics is founded on the principle of gains from trade. If economic activity is considered as a kind of game, then all players are made better off when they cooperate. Of course, political science knows other types of “games,” notably the prisoner’s dilemma. In this situation, a player may be better off by refusing to cooperate. Hence a situation where prisoner’s dilemma is prevalent will foste

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page told a riveting story Wednesday about parents in Compton, California, who are trying to stage a revolution in their local school, one of the worst in the city. They’re wielding a new “parent trigger” law in the state to force out the administrators and bring in a charter school operator. They’re learning that parents who put their children first are seen as

President Obama has thrown his support behind a bill to let states opt out of key features of the healthcare reform law before they take effect, including the controversial requirement that virtually all adult Americans buy insurance. The caveat, though, is that states must offer alternatives that provide comparable coverage to at least as many of the uninsured as the new law would, at no greater

The intellectual roots of the current democracy movement in the Middle East lie with those Muslim thinkers who hold that there is conceptual compatibility between Islam, modernity and democracy. They put stress on concepts such as liberty, human rights and human dignity, freedom of thought, scientific inquiry, contextual interpretation of sharia, the legal principles of the Koran, support for demo

Twenty-seven of the 31 North Koreans who strayed into the South Korean waters aboard a fishing boat a month ago, are stuck in limbo ― Pyongyang refuses to take them back unless Seoul sends them all. The other four desire to remain in the South. Is Pyongyang throwing tantrums when it says the South is holding them against their will?When South Korean officials took the 27 North Koreans to the truce

Until recently, the nation had 19 airports in operation. But the government had to close four of them during the 2002-07 period because they did not handle enough flights. Only a few others are faring any better than those four. But they are somehow in operation, wasting tens of billions of won in taxpayers’ money each year.A case in point is Muan international airport that opened in South Jeolla

Water resources management, highlighted in the No 1 central document issued in January, will in all probability be discussed at the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference. Water resources management is very important for China because the per capita availability of water in the country is about one-third of the world average. Pe

Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what your country has done for you lately.With apologies to John F. Kennedy, that’s what concerned citizens should be doing to get their heads around the debate in Washington about the appropriate size and role of government.Despite how riveted we are by Washington blood sports, average citizens don’t always understand what “government” means. That’s n

Financial institutions run into trouble when their officials exhibit a serious lack of morals. A case in point is the chaos at Shinhan Financial Group last year that was triggered by an internal feud among its three top executives. The trio staged a crippling power struggle in total disregard for the group’s reputation and the interests of its shareholders.The trio was ousted and the financial gro