When Park Geun-hye became president of South Korea earlier this year, there was a sense of unease among many that the election of a dictator’s daughter represented a step backward for the country’s three-decade old democracy. Recent events show those fears to be well...
President Obama has been criticized from both the left and right for his handling of the ongoing civil war in Syria. One of the most curious critiques, however, has to do with his decision to seek Congressional approval for a military strike against regime targets in...
Europe's most powerful nation has voted. On September 22nd, the people of Germany granted Angela Merkel a huge victory, awarding her center-right party nearly 50 percent of the seats in the federal parliament, the Bundestag. Although Merkel’s victory was a foregone...
Cross-posted from JohnFeffer.com. John is currently traveling in Eastern Europe and observing its transformations since 1989. In 1990, when I was in Romania, inter-ethnic conflicts broke out in Transylvania. Although the cause of the conflict in March 1990 in Targu...
All photos appear courtesy of the author, as well as another collaborator who cannot be named for safety reasons. For five months, Pedro Diaz and his daughter Iris—together with other members of the 400-family community of Rio Blanco, Honduras—have stood before this...
In every way, Yu Woo-seong was a model defector. In his early 30s, he was smart, friendly, ambitious, and well liked. Trained as a doctor in North Korea, he eschewed the competitive South Korean medical school system and instead pursued a bachelor’s degree in business...
It was famously described as the “end of history.” The collapse of Communism and the victory of liberalism near the end of the 20th century seemed to suggest that the great ideological conflicts of the previous eras had come to an end. A new and powerful consensus...
Supporters of the impending U.S. strike on Syria claim that it is necessary to punish the Assad regime for using chemical weapons on its citizens and to prevent it from further employing them. The situation, says Washington, calls for “humanitarian intervention.” ...
More than two years after an earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on a Japanese power plant, the Fukushima nuclear disaster is one of the most serious threats to public health in the Asia-Pacific, and the worst case of nuclear contamination the world has ever seen....
Would you believe me if I told you that your tax dollars are lining the pockets of some of the highest-paid CEOs? The Institute for Policy Studies recently released a report examining the performance of the corporate chief executives who have ranked among America’s 25...