Thanks to learned scientists, I’ve discovered that I suffer from a mental problem afflicting millions of Americans.It’s not really a disease. It’s more like a peculiarity, one that irritates polite society yet may be corrected with surgery to the frontal lobe. What is this deviancy?Conservatism.For many years now, conservatives have secretly feared the day when science would identify us as aberrant, or to use the vernacular, abby-normal.Sadly, that time has come, in the pages of the liberal-lean

The news that a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is suspected of shooting and killing three people near Jewish community centers in Kansas seems at first glance like a disparaged past flaring briefly into the present. Americans like to imagine that the KKK belongs to a long-gone South and anti-Semitism to a distant 20th century. Sadly, this better reflects a naive faith in the nation‘s history of religious tolerance than the realities experienced by many religious minorities. Although the

PARIS ― First, Cubans would receive fun little text messages about baseball and music. Then, one day ― bam! ― they would learn via cell phone that they’d been living in a dictatorship for over half a century and would realize that it was time to overthrow the regime.Hopefully American taxpayers like the plot of this far-fetched geopolitical revenge fantasy, because they’ve already paid for it. It’s yet another example of technology encroaching on the valuable space once occupied by gray matter.T

A child starving in South Sudan should matter to Americans.That was the message delivered last week by Nancy Lindborg, whose job at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is to lead a federal bureau spreading democracy and humanitarian assistance across the world.That world has reached a critical danger zone, with three high-level crises combining military conflict with humanitarian catastrophes affecting millions of innocents in Syria, the South Sudan and the Central African Repu

The global financial crash of 2008 not only diminished the savings of workers nearing retirement, but it also altered mindsets about the work cycle. In America, most people have to work their way back to the point where they originally had been ready to call it a day. With welfarism squeezed after the Clinton reforms and European workers being put on notice of a tightening of benefits, retirement is becoming a misnomer in the West. Workers are bracing themselves to continue on the job for as lon

Think of Songkran and two things immediately come to mind: water-splashing fun and deadly road accidents. Midway through the “Seven Dangerous Days,” dozens have been killed in auto accidents, snuffing caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s hopes for “seven days of happiness.”Worse, the number of road accidents has risen. The first three days of the festival, Friday through Sunday, saw 1,539 accidents, compared with 1,446 last year. No surprise, then, that injuries rose from 1,526 in 2013

A lot of noise was made in December after China sent its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, on a jaunt through the South China Sea. The deployment, termed a “training exercise” by the mainland government, caused great concern in Taiwan and Japan, coming shortly after Beijing’s controversial expansion of its Air Defense Identification Zone to include islands administered by Japan and claimed by China. The Liaoning, which is not fully operational yet, clipped Taiwan’s own ADIZ and one of its es

LOS ANGELES ― Twenty-eight years after its Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded, Ukraine confronts a nuclear specter of a different kind: the possibility that the country’s reactors could become military targets in the event of a Russian invasion. Speaking at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague in March, Andrii Deshchytsia, Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, cited the “potential threat to many nuclear facilities” should events deteriorate into open warfare.Earlier in the month, Ihor Prokopchuk,

Most Americans comply with the tax laws, but every year many of our fellow citizens don’t. The result is the “tax gap” ― the amount of revenue that the government loses because people are cheating. In one recent year, for example, the tax gap was $450 billion. That’s a lot of money ― more than 10 times the budget of the State Department.What can be done to increase compliance? Remarkably, a short letter to delinquent taxpayers ― based on the findings of behavioral science ― can have large effect

As tensions escalate in the eastern part of Ukraine, the country’s officials are in Washington looking to put the finishing touches on an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that provides immediate financial relief and opens the doors to help from others. Given the situation on the ground, these already-complex negotiations must find a way to balance economic, political, security and social considerations. Also, the parties need to come up with a lot of money to cover the country’s fi