“Professional ethics (in journalism) have fallen to the bottom … To be called a professional, one needs to be equipped with a license, armed with professional knowledge and bound by professional ethics. Today’s reportorial jobs seem to be free of these requirements. Opinion surveys find few respondents believing that reporters are ethically respectable. The thing is that journalism and journalists remain low both in public esteem and trust.”This quotation must sound like the usual complaint from

The F1 Grand Prix race is not coming back to Yeongam, South Jeolla Province, this year because of a dispute involving adjustment of contract terms. Few remember the 2011 Daegu World Track & Field Championships. All these huge sports-investments are staged to host local events while the deficit is ballooning. Incheon’s hosting of the 2009 World City Expo drew complaints from the Bureau International des Expositions in Paris due to unauthorized usage of the title “Expo.” Submission of unauthorized

Looking back upon American society in the 1950s and 1960s in his seminal novels “V.” and “The Crying of Lot 49” Thomas Pynchon laments the division of America into Left and Right, or radicalism and conservatism, which he describes metaphorically as “the street and the hothouse.” In his famous short story “Entropy,” Pynchon once again deplores the fact that conservatives choose to stay in the hothouse, not caring about what happens in the street, while radicals constantly instigate chaos and viol

WASHINGTON ― The Senate Intelligence Committee made headlines last week by reporting that the 2012 attack in Benghazi was preventable. But frankly, we knew that. The deeper message of the bipartisan report was that Republicans in Congress wasted a year arguing about what turned out to be mostly phony issues.The GOP’s Benghazi obsession was the weird backdrop for foreign-policy debate through much of last year. Sen. Lindsey Graham used it as a pretext for blocking administration nominations. Rep.

Fifty years ago, when Lyndon Johnson declared war on poverty, the poor were different ― “other,” as in Michael Harrington’s seminal book of 1962, “The Other America.”That’s no longer the case.After the War on Poverty ended, Republicans told working-class whites that their hard-earned tax dollars were being siphoned off to pay for “welfare queens” (as Ronald Reagan decorously dubbed a black single woman on welfare) and other nefarious loafers. The poor were “them” ― lazy, dependent on government

BERLIN ― The Geneva II conference on Syria, set to begin in Montreux, Switzerland, on Jan. 22, is unlikely to achieve its goal of forming a transitional governing authority with full executive powers. But what it can do is launch a much-needed political process and, more important, produce a cease-fire agreement between government and opposition forces. Only when the fighting has stopped can Syria make genuine progress toward a political transition.Of course, al-Qaida-linked jihadist groups like