In his bid for re-election, Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak has dispensed with all shame. Vote for me, he has essentially declared, or Malaysia will suffer “catastrophic ruin” and an “Arab Winter” of the kind that has undone economies from Egypt to Libya. Both warnings are ludicrous ― signs of how worried Najib’s National Front coalition is of losing power for the first time since 1957. They speak to the desperation of a government that has come to serve itself, not Malaysia’s 29 million pe

Viewpoints April 24, 2013

Even if no one ever tells him so, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev has the right to remain silent. And even if he never utters another word, there is probably more than enough evidence to convict him. So all the concern about whether authorities gave him a Miranda warning, informing him of his right to remain silent and to have a lawyer, is sort of beside the point. Sort of ― but not entirely. Tsarnaev is a suspected criminal, not an enemy combatant, as the Justice Department properly acknowledged by charging

Viewpoints April 23, 2013

The debate over immigration reform has raised a question that’s almost as challenging: What should we call the approximately 11 million people who are in the United States illegally?The term illegal immigrants has been used routinely and often considered neutral. News organizations, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, have used it for years to describe people by their actions. But there is a case to be made that it dehumanizes a class of people by suggesting that they themselves are somehow aga

Viewpoints April 23, 2013

The great psychologist William James was Gertrude Stein’s teacher and mentor. As legend tells it, James once posed a single question on a final examination: “What is risk?” Stein wrote, “This is,” walked out of the examination room, and went about her business. Supposedly James gave Stein an A. After a tragedy such as the one last week in Boston, people have a heightened sense of risk. If a flood, an earthquake, a violent crime or a terrorist attack has occurred in the recent past, people tend t

Viewpoints April 23, 2013

While media coverage of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s inauguration on Friday centered on the contested April 14 election results, a dramatic escalation of government human rights violations since the election has gone virtually unnoticed.International human rights groups and Venezuelan opposition leaders say that in recent days the Maduro government has carried out a de facto takeover of Congress and is suppressing freedom of speech and assembly throughout the nation.“The dispute over th

Viewpoints April 23, 2013

For several hours each year on the third Monday of April, the 600 block of Boylston Street in Boston is the most surveilled place on Earth. Television crews, news and commercial photographers, Web videographers, friends, family, tourists ― and, not incidentally, law enforcement ― all have their electronic eyes trained on the finish line of the Boston Marathon. This partly explains the whiplash speed of the investigation into this week’s bombings. With so much information, a break in the case was

Viewpoints April 22, 2013

In a capitalist economy, the stock market is expected to play a central role in financing corporate investment and monitoring companies’ performance. But in Korea, this has not been the case. Here, the bourse has ceased to be a source of capital and has instead become a playground for stock speculators and manipulators.The Korea Exchange has recently released data showing how serious the problem is. According to the bourse operator, the number of stocks that were improperly traded last year amou

Editorial April 22, 2013

Hyundai Motor Group set a good example for others to follow when it decided last week to reduce inter-subsidiary logistics and advertising deals worth 600 billion won a year in order to offer new business opportunities to outside firms, especially small and medium enterprises. The auto giant’s move is welcome, but it needs to go further by doing the same in other business fields.The plan will reduce the revenue of Hyundai Glovis, a company that ships Hyundai and Kia cars around the world, by 480

Editorial April 22, 2013

The world, in all its tangled webs, will be read into the Boston bombing suspects. For some, the Tsarnaev brothers are Chechen avengers, young men seared by the long war in Russia’s “southern backyard.” For Vladimir Putin and his regime, this deed of terror in an American city is, doubtless, a vindication of the iron fist with which the Russians fought their long war against Chechnya, proof of the malignancy of the Islamist menace. Foes of immigration can be expected to offer the Tsarnaev brothe

Viewpoints April 22, 2013

It’s no wonder it took so long. The bipartisan immigration bill introduced this week in the U.S. Senate is a hefty, voluminous achievement. It weighs in at almost 900 pages; given its complex political calibrations, it will need a strong binding to withstand the onslaught to come. The bill lays out a rough, but realistic, road to citizenship for the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. They will have to pay a series of phased- in fines adding up to $2,000, demonstrate a k

Viewpoints April 21, 2013