The Chinese Communist Party announced grand plans for “reform” at the end of its third plenum meeting in November, including a promise to end its disastrous one child per family policy.Don’t bet on it.That one-child law leads to ugly forced abortions and sterilizations ― as well as rampant cheating. Wealthy people have been having as many children as they want. No one tries to stop them, as long as the parents are willing to pay a fine of $50,000 or more.All of that is bad enough. But the larger

Western analysts have been scratching their heads trying to figure out if China’s new leader, Xi Jinping, can properly be labeled a “reformer.”His new policies promise to end labor camps, ease the one-child policy and migrant-residency requirement in cities, grant property rights to farmers, and open up many new areas to a “decisive” role for the market. At the same time, he has strengthened the grip of the Communist Party, accumulated more power at the center, asserted ideological orthodoxy and

PARIS ― Remember when you were a kid and you would open a full refrigerator right after mom’s latest grocery-shopping trip, only to complain that there was nothing to eat and that she was starving you to death? Well, that’s Iran right now. Iran has enough energy to light up the entire planet several times over ― 138 billion exploitable barrels of oil and more than 28 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency ― yet it constantly whines that it’s sta

A few days ago, I bought subway train tickets with my adopted youngest son, who’s 12 years old. After looking at them and fiddling with the change he murmured, “My birth mother may have touched these same coins.”He’s been missing his birth mother, who bore him and brought him into the world, even though he has never met her. He was expressing a bone-deep longing, which would hurt my wife’s heart if she heard him express it.Every person has a unique personality. Personality basically starts with

What would it be like to watch a live broadcast of a court decision on a highly political territorial dispute with another country? Just ask those who are in Bangkok and Phnom Penh. As the critical decision on the 100-year-old Thai-Cambodian territorial dispute was being rendered two weeks ago by the U.N.’s International Court of Justice in The Hague, the two nations were holding their breath. This proceeding, a sequel to the 1962 dispute between the two at the same court, concerns an 11th centu

U.S. President Barack Obama has had two overarching goals in the Iran crisis. The first was to stop the Iranian regime from gaining possession of a nuclear weapon. The second was to prevent Israel from attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities.This weekend, the president achieved one of these goals. He boxed-in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu so comprehensively that it’s unimaginable Israel will strike Iran in the foreseeable future. Netanyahu had his best chance to attack in 2010 and 2011,

Hollywood has long fetishized Japanese gangsters, with their full-body tattoos, missing pinkies and harems of buxom groupies. Ever since Sydney Pollack’s “The Yakuza” in 1974, the colorful mafiosi have provided regular fodder for directors including Ridley Scott and Quentin Tarantino.Curiously, studios are again abuzz with a flurry of Japanese mob projects. Warner Bros. is developing “The Outsider,” about an American prisoner of war who joins the yakuza after World War II. Robert Whiting’s 1999

As a Catholic and long-term resident of Korea I feel a need to respond to the remarks made by Catholic priest Park Chang-shin as reported on the front page of your paper on Nov. 25.The statement attributed to Park, “What should North Korea do if South Korea-U.S. military exercises are being carried out (near) the problematic NLL? North Korea needs to open fire. That was the shelling of Yeonpyeongdo Island,” spoken at a Catholic Mass held on Friday, has no place in the Catholic church, and in fac

The Obama administration has cut an interim nuclear deal with Iran that gravely worries some of America’s strongest allies in the Middle East and even gives pause to some of President Barack Obama’s allies in the U.S. Senate.It’s easy to see what Iran gets out of this: a reprieve from crippling economic sanctions worth some $6 billion to $7 billion in cash.It’s more difficult to figure that Iran views this as the first step toward giving up its nuclear ambitions. Iran will stall some of its deve

While there may be some bruised feelings and anger left behind in the aftermath, the so-called “nuclear option” unleashed Thursday by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Democrats hardly seems worthy of its destructive billing. It means only that from now on in judicial nominations other than those for the Supreme Court, the majority will no longer have to muster 60 votes to win confirmation.That Senate Republicans immediately compared the change in Senate rules to Obamacare ― a non sequit

The need to respond effectively to climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time, particularly more so in the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan. While no one typhoon can be directly linked to climate change, rising global temperatures and warming oceans provide the conditions that fuel these kinds of monster storms. A recent analysis of the economics of climate change in the East Asian countries of People’s Republic of China, Republic of Korea, Japan and Mongolia delivers two clear mess