Almost everyone knows CEO pay is out of control. It surged 16 percent at big companies last year, according to the New York Times, and the typical CEO raked in $15.1 million.Meanwhile, the median wage continued to drop, adjusted for inflation.What’s less well-known is that you and I and other taxpayers are subsidizing this sky-high executive compensation. That’s because corporations deduct it from their income taxes, causing the rest of us to pay more in taxes to make up the difference.This tax

Americans like to pretend that politics don’t matter and to bemoan the slight differences between our political parties. These are luxuries we can afford as the world’s richest and most stable country. But for much of the world, politics are a matter of life and death. That is particularly evident in South Korea, which over this past weekend celebrated the 60th anniversary of the armistice that ended the Korean War.It is hard to exaggerate how devastated the Korean peninsula was in 1953; Gen. Do

I still vividly remember the day I watched the mesmerizing French movie “A Man and a Woman” for the first time as a college student in the mid-1960s. The movie is about a young widow and a widower who fall in love after meeting by chance at their children’s boarding school. But because of the beautiful memories of their deceased spouses, their relationship cannot progress. Anne, a movie scriptwriter, cannot forget her beloved stuntman husband who was accidentally killed on a movie set as she wat

Anyone who doubts the dangerous consequences of White House waffling on Syria should note some startling statements by U.S. officials in recent days.Let’s start at the top. After two years of insistence that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad must go, the White House started publicly hedging last week. No doubt that was a reaction to the fact that Assad, armed and aided by Russia, Iran, and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah, has been scoring major victories against the Syrian rebels.The new W

Still-smoldering protests from Egypt to Brazil have set off a race among scholars and journalists to identify the roots of this summer of discontent in the emerging world. Each major theory starts at the bottom, with the protesters on the street, and notes a common thread: young, Twitter-savvy members of a rising middle class. In this telling, the protests represent the perils of success, as growing wealth creates a class of people who have the time and financial wherewithal to demand from their