[Tim Rutten] In Libya, ‘mission creep’ sets in

In the think-tank argot popular in foreign policy circles, “mission creep” is an idiom for one of the garden-variety mistakes most people were warned against at their mother’s knee. Think “don’t throw good money after bad” and you’ve pretty well got the essence of the thing.Predictably, though, mission creep is what’s occurring in Libya. Each halting step the United States and its NATO allies take

April 28, 2011

Hoping the message and works of author are not tarnished

I’ve long been an admirer of Greg Mortenson, the author of the phenomenal best-seller “Three Cups of Tea.” The book tells how he began building girls’ schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan after making a pledge to the villagers of Korphe, who had rescued him from a failed attempt to summit the world’s second-highest peak, K-2.To see his work, I traveled with Greg in 2007 to visit schools he’d built

April 28, 2011

[Edward Wasserman] Lawsuit exposes musty values of Internet economy

In 1991 a lawsuit filed by a freelance journalist was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the New York Times owed money to independent writers it had published for reselling their work from its archives. This was a big deal ― in theory, anyway.In fact, all it did was force publishers to get their lawyers to write bulletproof waivers for freelancers to sign. That waiver is a thing o

April 28, 2011

[Editorial] Pressure for talks

Pressure is mounting on South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea and withdraw opposition to resuming denuclearization talks in the absence of Pyongyang’s apology for its earlier unprovoked hostilities. As Winston Churchill famously said, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. But what if the North Korean communists do not abandon the idea of war-war while in talks?North Korea has been knock

April 27, 2011

[Gregory Rodriguez] War between the whites 150 years ago

The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 ― with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids ― was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy.Think about it. If she really wanted to have h

April 27, 2011

U.S. and other NATO members lost in Libya

What’s happening in Libya? When we last checked in, President Obama had said that the United States would participate in the U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone but that this was not ― repeat not ― a war to oust Moammar Gadhafi. Rather, the narrow purpose of the operation was to avert humanitarian disaster. He acknowledged that he would like to see Gadhafi go, but said that under no circumstances would gro

April 27, 2011

[Najmedin Meshkati] Chernobyl: Lessons for nuclear power industry

The world commemorated the 25th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant catastrophic accident in Ukraine on April 26. However, this event did not do justice to the significance and impact of this plant on the world, as I saw and felt about it in 1997.When I got the first sight of the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power station while being driven in the Exclusion Zone toward the pla

April 27, 2011

Corruption has become a way of life

From womb to tomb, corruption has become a part of everyday life.It’s so widespread that only few Indians ― rich or poor, illiterate or highly-educated ― have not experienced it first-hand.All politicians promise to stem it but when in power, they invariably end up being stained by it.An expectant mother has to grease the palm of officials in a government hospital for admission while it is routine

April 27, 2011

Spare no expense for nuclear plant safety

Efforts have been made at nuclear power plants across the nation to ramp up safety measures in the wake of the series of serious accidents that occurred at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant in the aftermath of the massive tsunami on March 11.Plant operators reportedly aim to establish safety measures to prevent similar accidents from happening even if a plant is struck by a

April 26, 2011

Cushioning the impact of price controls

The fast fall in vegetable prices must be what Chinese policymakers have long anticipated in their fight against soaring consumer inflation. But sadly, as the recent suicide of a cabbage grower Han Jin in Shandong province shows, it is proving too dear for many Chinese farmers. The Ministry of Commerce and the Ministry of Agriculture are right to take immediate action to help farmers facing an ove

April 26, 2011

[David Ignatius] Budget: When delay means more pain

WASHINGTON ― It’s a truth of economics and life that if you have bad news coming, take the hit early and get it behind you. You can’t start building until the debris is out of the way. Modern illustrations of this “pain, then gain” approach start with Paul Volcker, Mr. Tough Guy, who as Fed chairman sharply raised interest rates in 1979 to break the inflationary psychology that had a grip on the U

April 26, 2011

[Tim Rutten] Obama’s lack of moral clarity on genocide issue

The line between prudence and moral cowardice can be a fine one, particularly when it comes to the conduct of diplomacy.For Americans, the question of where and how to make such distinctions has a particular urgency last week, as we commemorated the 96th anniversary of the genocide inflicted on the Armenians by the Ottoman Turks. In massacres from 1915 to 1923, more than 1.5 million Armenians were

April 26, 2011

[Frida Ghitis] Is everybody happy?

How happy are you? How happy is the country? This very important question has gradually gained attention over the years, occupying the attention not only of psychologists and New Age gurus, but of economists, political scientists and government leaders.The field of happiness studies is booming with researchers hard at work taking our emotional temperature, figuring out how we feel and trying to un

April 26, 2011

[Michael Smerconish] A solution for FAA? Ask a morning radio guy

I have a blue-ribbon commission in mind for Ray LaHood as he tries to sort out what to do about sleeping air traffic controllers. The panel members I’m thinking of have names like Preston & Steve, Cataldi, heck, maybe even Harvey in the Morning. Because when I heard the secretary of transportation say he’d never allow naps on the job, the first person I thought of was a radio DJ.For years, Don Can

April 26, 2011

[Charles Wohlforth] BP oil spill: Forgotten but not gone

From April into midsummer last year, Americans watched BP’s oil spew from the seafloor into the Gulf of Mexico with outrage and guilt that came to feel like a chronic stomachache.Then, on July 15, it stopped. And within a couple of weeks the bad feelings for a lot of us stopped too. There were reports that the surface oil was quickly disappearing. There was a government study that hopeful journali

April 25, 2011