A spate of student suicides has pushed the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, one of Korea’s top science universities in Daejeon, into a crisis it has never experienced before. In a short span of three months, four students took their own lives, shocking the school’s students and staff. The latest victim was a 19-year-old sophomore, identified by his surname Park, who jumped to hi

These days it seems impossible to write about Detroit in measured terms. Words like “war zone,” “post-apocalyptic” and “ghost town” are often used. Stories portray it as a dystopian landscape of crumbling Gilded Age monuments, abandoned warehouses and overgrown vacant lots.Recent census data confirms that residents are moving out as fast as wildlife is moving in. A sympathetic tone of urban social

At a time when teachers and their unions are under fire across the nation, my eldest daughter just had a much-anticipated interview with Teach for America. She will graduate from college in May and hopes to be a teacher in the fall.She was worried that I’d be disappointed she didn’t feel a desire for graduate school.But I was thrilled. Since graduating from college in 1984, I’ve taught GED (Genera

The crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant does not warrant optimism. Nuclear fuel in the cores of the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors is believed to have been severely damaged. In the No. 4 reactor’s storage, where spent nuclear fuel is kept, water evaporated at one point, and a hydrogen explosion released radioactive substances into the environment.The governmen

Wedge issues are the rhetorical enablers of the bitterly partisan politics that have disfigured our national conversation in recent years.They’re the controversial questions on which significant numbers of voters hold views that admit no compromise or nuanced disagreement. Candidates raise them to divide their constituents and to morally discredit their opponents. Abortion is a classic wedge issue

Thailand’s Pheu Thai Party’s proposal to give the three southernmost provinces some degree of autonomy sounded like a political campaign platform ― but on closer examination it looks more and more like a cheap ploy to win votes.What’s worse, its proponents are exploiting the sentiment of the Malay Muslims of the deep South, who deserve better.In this heavily centralized country of ours, decentrali

The Filipino public’s consuming interest in the execution of Sally Ordinario-Villanueva, Ramon Credo and Elizabeth Batain was both melodramatic and inevitable. The three drug mules were the first Filipinos to be executed by China, and their personal narratives mirrored the stories and the self-image of millions of Filipinos, as hardy but unfortunate creatures of circumstance. Little wonder, then,

Rep. Paul Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee, has proposed the most ambitious tax-and-spending plan that Capitol Hill has seen in years. His budget proposal for fiscal 2012 doesn’t merely seek to pare the enormous federal deficit and bring the national debt under control, which it would do much more aggressively than the plan President Obama offered in February. I

Florida pastor Terry Jones certainly deserves a lion’s share of criticism for his symbolic burning of the Quran on March 20, having been warned for months that it was almost certain to provoke violence in the Muslim world. It did, and now 24 people are dead in Afghanistan, including six U.N. workers in the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif.It is important to note, however, that the reaction of Musli

Boorish relatives, vengeful exes, inappropriate work attire, unsent thank-you notes ― traditional advice columnists have spent decades offering prescriptions for these gaffes.Now, thanks to social media, the Internet and any number of gadgets and innovations, we have the means to offend or upset people on an unprecedented scale. With every new technology, there are new ways to make an absolute foo