Manila should not get deep into a tit for tat with Beijing over the Scarborough Shoal dispute despite the two capitals trading barbs against each other. While the exchange is understandable and has been kept to levels short of open hostilities, the Philippines should focus on elevating the dispute to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS). A month after the standoff, the Philippines has not made good its plan to elevate the matter to ITLOS unilaterally. If Manila thinks that i

Thousands of tickets have been sold for the Lady Gaga concert, scheduled for June 3. If the event is canceled, fans will surely get their money back, as with previously abandoned music performances. But the reason this time would officially not be a security threat in light of a recent bombing attack, prompting organizers to call off the concert. In the words of the police, it would be because the star “indulges in revealing her body, dancing erotically and spreading pornography.”Speaking for th

While there are no known foolproof solutions to conflicting territorial claims in international politics, patience and self-restraint seem to be a sensible course of action for all the claimants, because if a dispute degenerates into armed conflict, none of the claimants can be assured of the outcome and may even end up losing more than they might have otherwise gained. There is also the risk of conflicts spilling over into new fights and the danger of collateral damage. A case in point is the d

While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer Lopez gyrating around in a bodysuit on “American Idol” long enough to bother caring?Now replace “Greece” with “your bank.” It suddenly matters a little more, doesn’t it? What if your bank couldn’t loan yo

ROME ― This month, NATO will hold its next summit in Chicago. Unlike European Union summits, which take place almost monthly, NATO’s are infrequent. This helps to explain the inflated rhetoric that surrounds them: the November 2010 summit in Lisbon, for example, was described as nothing less than “the most important in NATO’s history.” Will the Chicago summit prove to be an exception to this rule?For a while, that seemed likely, with the meeting initially billed as an “implementation summit,” at

Without even waiting a decent interval for mourning, JPMorgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon launched his defense campaign over the disclosure that he presided over a $2 billion trading loss in derivatives within days of the disclosure itself, choosing the comforting confines of NBC’s “Meet the Press” for the campaign kick-off.His argument is plainly designed to distract from the right way to think about JPM’s fiasco, which is that it’s exactly the sort of thing that regulations should forbid banks

A Greek exit from the euro area has the potential to be the European Union’s most economically and politically destructive event of a generation. Unfortunately, Europe has reached the point where it must prepare for such an outcome. Whether Greeks want it or not, circumstances could soon force their country to return to the drachma. Europe’s leaders, as Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker hinted, might extend Greece’s deadlines to meet the budget targets required for rescue money, but

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood slapped down Reuters for reporting a few weeks ago that he wants “a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.” His press secretary, Justin Nisly, called the report inaccurate, saying LaHood merely wants “Congress to incentivize states to pass anti-texting and driving legislation, similar to the approach taken to prevent drunk driving and promote seat belt use.” It’s not a reassuring comm

Addressing New York’s Korea Society last week, South Korea’s acting National Assembly Speaker, Chung Ui-hwa, argued that today’s South Korea can take a cue from how 1980s West Germany overcame Germany’s Cold War division. To quote verbatim, Chung said, “The (conservative) Christian Democratic Union, under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was not happy with the Socialist Democratic Party’s appeasement toward East Germany. Nevertheless, the CDU government inherited the policy of Ostpoliti