The months ahead in 2011 will constitute a summer to remember for a long, long time.The world’s two largest economies ― the United States and Europe ― are drifting toward brutal days of reckoning. Both economies face severe financial and economic challenges.Failure by either or both would send severe shocks through the already limping global economy. In the United States, a fiercely aroused but in

Everyone knows you can train a dog by rewarding the behavior you want Rover to repeat. But Barack Obama has always been ambitious, so he trains Republicans. The behavior he rewards is intransigence. Every time congressional Republicans adopt an inflexible position ― such as their current no-tax-hikes stance in negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling ― the president rewards them with a t

The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade.Every other sort ― no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up ― is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable. That’s the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of t

A newly independent country in North Africa has got off to an uncertain start. The country needs support from the international community until it can move ahead on its own.South Sudan, officially the Republic of South Sudan, became the 54th independent nation on the African continent when it officially separated from Sudan on July 9.Over the past half-century, the Sudanese people suffered from ci

The introduction of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks and online video-streaming sites has revolutionized the concept of “breaking news” and information distribution.Using the highly visual and instantaneous new media can allow something to spread faster than the proverbial wildfire, creating a borderless, 24-hour wellspring of data that simultaneously attracts millions of eyeballs acro

For the print media struggling to survive in a world that seems to be inexorably bent on embracing the electronic media, the news that News of the World, London’s biggest selling weekend tabloid, was closing was, indeed, cruel, cruel news. If only for the paper’s longevity, the last issue last Sunday of the 168-year-old News of the World was headline news many times over. The News was an instituti

It is noteworthy that over the years whenever there has been a rift in Sino-U.S. ties, bilateral military relations have always been the first to be affected and that even when bilateral relations are warming, military-to-military exchanges are usually the last to thaw. With the unfolding of a series of reciprocal visits and dialogues between the two militaries this year, including former U.S. Sec

Among the many proposals to raise taxes and cut and reallocate government spending to regain our country’s economic health, one of the most sensitive is decreasing the tax deductibility of charitable contributions.The independent Congressional Budget Office recently reviewed 11 options for revising the income tax treatment of charitable giving, and it grouped them into four categories. All establi

Denouncing a proposal to cut $150 million out of a courts budget that has already absorbed a $200 million reduction, California’s chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, recently warned that the “devastating and crippling” cuts would “threaten access to justice for all.”California’s not alone. Last month, 350 court employees in New York were laid off to offset $170 million in cuts to the state judicia

The first signs of a post-revolutionary hangover are everywhere in the Arab world. Where unity of purpose once defined the reform movements in Egypt and Tunisia, now particular interests are coming to the fore. Forces for change are fracturing. Conflicts revolve not just around the constitutional framework of the transition away from dictatorship or the place of Islam in public life, but increasin