WASHINGTON ― As al-Qaida splits and morphs into different affiliates and offshoots, U.S. counterterrorism officials worry about what one calls a “potential competitive dynamic” in which different factions ― including the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, now sowing civil war in Iraq ― seek to bolster their credibility by attacking the United States. This new danger of attacks on the U.S. homeland is what concerns the Obama administration most about the splintering process that has created ISIS, a

The world is gripped by soccer fever with the World Cup underway in Brazil. During the next few weeks, about half of the world’s population will be riveted to their TVs to watch the planet’s biggest quadrennial soccer event.Many Korean soccer fans are having sleepless nights to watch all the live action from the opposite side of the globe. They have to stay awake until the early morning, as all games start after 1 a.m. But World Cup fever here is more subdued than in previous years. One factor i

General Motors has fired 15 employees after an internal investigation into the company's handling of defective ignition switches that lead to at least 13 fatalities.But the only way to stop lawbreaking at GM or any other big corporation is to prosecute the people who break the law. And so far, no one at GM has been prosecuted.“What GM did was break the law. ... They failed to meet their public safety obligations,” scolded Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx after imposing the largest possib

WASHINGTON ― The capture Tuesday of Mosul, the hub of northern Iraq, by al-Qaida-linked militants is an alarm bell that violent extremists are on the rise again in the Middle East. And it’s a good time for President Obama to explain more about how he plans to fight this menace without making the mistakes of the past. Obama needs to alert the country to the renewed extremist threat partly to clarify the record. Just 19 months ago, he won reelection arguing that his policies had vanquished the mos

A passing phase or a dangerous and permanent strategic challenge to Asian stability for years to come? That, in a nutshell, is the debate about China’s current behavior in the South China Sea, which appears almost deliberately designed to provoke most of the region’s nations.But even if no categorical answer can be provided to this question, it is clear that China has crossed a fundamental psychological barrier.Beijing is no longer engaged in just a reactive or theoretical assertion of its right

BERLIN ― One aspect of the Ukraine crisis that both Russia and the West need to understand is that the rest of the world appears to be relatively unconcerned about it. Though the West, along with Japan, may view the crisis as a challenge to the global order, most other states do not feel threatened by Russia’s annexation of Crimea or designs it may have elsewhere in Ukraine. Instead, many view this crisis as being largely about Europe’s inability to resolve its own regional disputes ― though a s

Call me outdated, but I’m not on a cloud, not even Google Drive. Despite having covered tech news for some time and written about the endless potential of cloud computing, I just never got around to actually get myself that kind of backup. My laziness finally came to bite me in the back when my phone suddenly died last week. Yes, yes, I know it happens to everyone at one point in their lives but I truly had not imagined it would happen to me.Or at least I wanted to ignore it because I had starte

“Gansong” Jeon Hyeong-pil was born in 1906 and died in 1962. Anyone who regrets that the great art collector’s 56-year life was too short can feel his rebirth while viewing the Gansong Exhibition in the new Dongdaemun Design Plaza.The dedication in March of the DDP as a center for promoting industrial and artistic design was no doubt one of the greatest cultural events in decades along with the opening of the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul late last year. The huge amoeba-shaped edi