Congress is in recess, but you’d hardly know it. This has been the most do-nothing, gridlocked Congress in decades. But the recess at least offers a pause in the ongoing partisan fighting that’s sure to resume in a few weeks.It also offers an opportunity to step back and ask ourselves what’s really at stake.A society ― any society ― is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospi

TAIPEI ― The South China Sea controversy continues to roil the waters. China claims to own almost every square inch, including every island and natural feature in this vast sea ― despite angry protestations from its neighbors.Well, a similar debate simmers just north, in the East China Sea, which borders Taiwan, China and Japan. There, a group of small islands known as the Diaoyu if you’re Chinese, or Senkakus if you’re Japanese, are also objects of covetous contestation.Various passive explorat

The intensifying hostility between China and Japan and the increasing mutual distrust between their peoples will have serious ramifications for ASEAN.For the past three decades, the two Asian giants’ stable relations have helped generate huge volumes of trade and investment and propelled the region’s economic progress. So if the current trend in East Asia continues, ASEAN’s ambitious plan to build a community of 630 million people with a single production base will suffer.A recent survey conduct

WASHINGTON ― Watching Saudi Arabia and other wealthy Gulf states line up behind the bloody counterrevolution in Egypt, you can’t help suspecting that these conservative monarchies are ready to fight to the last Egyptian against the Muslim Brotherhood ― waging what amounts to a proxy war against the regional threat of Islamist extremism. The events of the past few weeks have been the culmination of a trend building since February 2011, when President Hosni Mubarak was pushed from power in what ma

The dog days of 2013 have gone and the traditional calendar declares “cheoseo,” the withdrawal of heat, on Aug. 23. Koreans who struggled under record-high temperatures hovering near 40 degrees Celsius from the south coast to the DMZ now deserve to be able to relax in the cool air of the early morning and evening hours.A little busier than others will be police, prosecutors and judges who now have to serve justice on the many people who have been arraigned for crimes related to the heat. Of cour