With thousands of unemployed graduates, the Singapore government plans to cap campus enrolment.It is clearer now why the government had been discouraging Singaporeans from depending too much on university degrees.The reason is that the pool of unemployed graduates is expanding in this wealthy city, despite a general shortage of workers.Almost by the week, new cases are being reported about well-educated professionals struggling to find jobs.The latest example: A 29-year-old accountancy and finan

China’s surprise declaration of a discretionary air reporting zone over the East China Sea caught the region unawares. There was neither any warning nor consultation on its plans. More troubling was that precisely what China would choose to do to enforce implied restrictions was left more than a little vague, because there has been no normative behaviour demonstrated although defensive air zones have a history going back 60 years. The American B-52 planes’ fly-past, which drew no response, looke

“Unity” can be a powerful political rallying cry, intended to destroy one thing as much as to protect another. Or it can be uttered out of pure love and concern. We heard Thai King Bhumibol say it last week without expecting cheers or fists in the air in response. The monarch’s long pauses during his birthday speech meant the word did not even come in a complete sentence. But the message was perfectly loud and clear: He wants a nation at war with itself to stop and think it over.The king’s voice

The standardized tests known as the Program for International Student Assessment are considered so important that when the latest results were released last week, the U.S. Department of Education participated in a so-called PISA Day.The leaders of the nation’s teachers unions immediately fired off news releases asserting that the mediocre PISA scores of American students showed that more than a decade of testing-based reform had failed our schools. Prominent reform leaders, by contrast, conclude

Has John F. Kerry turned into the unexpected star of President Barack Obama’s second term?He was Obama’s second choice as secretary of state (after Susan Rice). He’s the same windy, stiff Bostonian who ran unsuccessfully for president a decade ago. And he has taken on a list of assignments that looked distinctly unpromising: nuclear negotiations with Iran, peace between Israel and the Palestinians, the civil war in Syria.But in 10 months, Kerry has embarked on a whirlwind of diplomacy. He helped

A couple of weeks ago, accosted on the street by paparazzi, MSNBC talk show host Alec Baldwin spontaneously uncorked a homophobic slur. The result: The network kicked him off the air, for good.About the same time, another MSNBC host, Martin Bashir, delivered a scripted on-air commentary in which he said that somebody should urinate and defecate in Sarah Palin’s mouth. The result: He had to apologize.Last year, Rush Limbaugh called a young woman who testified to a congressional committee in suppo

Joe Biden’s trip to northeast Asia has left some in Japan feeling abandoned. By not demanding that China roll back its new “air defense identification zone,” the U.S. vice president tacitly accepted the controversial zone as a fait accompli.Yet a tougher stance would have led nowhere. China is not about to retract the zone under U.S. pressure. To lay down that red line would only keep emotions in the region at fever pitch. Leaders should instead look to lower tensions and begin rational discussi

Women in Japan are used to being underutilized, condescended to and exploited. Must they play a role in Newt Gingrich’s cheap Washington partisanship, too?The U.S. news media are gleefully running a video from Joe Biden’s visit to Tokyo that supposedly depicts the U.S. vice president as an out-of-touch sexist. On Dec. 3, Biden and Caroline Kennedy, the first female U.S. ambassador to Japan, visited DeNA Co., a Japanese Internet company founded by a woman that does a better job than most of takin

Nelson Mandela sold out black South Africans. Now there’s a sentence you won’t have heard in the days since his death and that you won’t be hearing at his memorial tomorrow. Yet it’s incontrovertibly true that after centuries of being robbed of possibly the greatest mineral wealth the world has ever known, not to mention decades of being repressed by apartheid, black South Africans got almost no compensation for what should rightfully have been theirs when the old regime was swept away for the n

Five years after the onset of its worst recession, the European Union’s economic recovery remains painfully slow. Has anything been learned from this dismal performance about how governments can combat severe recessions? The answer is yes ― but sadly, the clearest lessons are the ones governments seem least likely to apply.It would be hard to deny that Europe’s record has been awful. Over the past four years, gross domestic product in the euro area has grown by less than 3 percent; output fell s

In 1981, President Ronald Reagan instructed federal agencies that they could issue regulations only after demonstrating that their benefits justified their costs. With modest changes, Reagan’s successors, both Republican and Democratic, have continued to impose this requirement on agencies considering rules designed to protect clean air, food safety, workplace safety and much more.But a crucial question remains: Can the government’s numbers be trusted, or are they just a lot of hot air?In Washin