On September 13, 2010, South Korea released an extensive report detailing North Korea’s responsibility for an unprovoked attack on the South Korean naval vessel Cheonan. The 313-page report provides overwhelming, irrefutable evidence that Pyongyang deliberately sank the Cheonan with a torpedo launched from a submarine. Although North Korea’s motives for this act of war remain uncertain, the evidence is beyond doubt. The report describes in minute detail the results of a five-nation, two-month long investigation. The report uses scientific methods to inextricably link Pyongyang to the egregious attack. The release …
Was it wise for the Obama administration to reverse the Bush administration’s policy of distancing the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council? With the Council’s 15th session underway, it’s a question worth asking. The Council has been receiving more attention than unusual lately because the administration recently submitted a report on the U.S. human rights record for the Council’s Universal Periodic Review process. The report has led many to question what America gets out of membership on that body. In response, the U.S. ambassador to the Council, Eileen …
With the recently released numbers regarding poverty levels in America, public concern is heightened, in particular, regarding the plight of America’s impoverished children. This concern should generate a focus on what might empower them to rise up from poverty—and, in turn, what factors promote stable marriages. Research clearly indicates that one of the most important factors in a child’s welfare is whether she is born to married parents. Children raised by single parents are seven times more likely to live in poverty than peers in families with two married parents. …
Reducing budget deficits by cutting government spending has a stronger record of economic stimulus than either reducing the deficit with tax increases or increasing government spending. That’s what Harvard economists Albert Alesina and Silvia Ardagna have found in their recent research. They examined 107 instances of large reductions (at least 1.5 percent in one year) in budget deficits as well as 91 instances of large increases (over 1.5 percent in one year) in budget deficits over the past 40 years. They found that when an economy expands following deficit reduction, …
Americans are increasingly cutting the cord on their phones. By the most recent estimates, 40 percent Americans rely primarily on their wireless phone for voice calls, and most of those don’t have a wireline phone at all. But don’t count me in that number. It’s not that I wouldn’t like to cut the cord. It’s that I can’t. I live in a cellular hole, one of those thousands of places where wireless connections are weak or non-existent. The reason isn’t geography—I live in a well-developed part of the Washington metro …
Today at 9:30 AM, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee will take up the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START). President Barack Obama’s allies on the committee, including committee chair John Kerry (D-MA) and ranking member Richard Lugar (R-IN), both support the treaty, so the treaty is all but guaranteed to pass out of the committee. But the agreement also needs 67 votes for approval in the full Senate, which is why the White House is desperate to get at least one conservative to vote for the treaty in committee. …
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton has today announced the appointment of more than two dozen new Ambassadors who will serve under the blue and gold flag of the European Union rather than their national colors. However, she should be keeping a closer eye on her existing corps. Having been outmaneuvered by European Commission president José Manuel Barroso in the appointment of his friend, João Vale de Almeida to the post of EU Ambassador to the United States, it is nevertheless still her responsibility to keep Almeida in line. His …
Two centuries ago in Mexico a powerful advocate proposed New World freedoms and liberty as the answer to Old World tyranny. The voice came from an obscure Catholic priest named Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla and, issued on September 16, 1810, is remembered as the famous call for Mexican independence from Spain. Like Americans in the 1770s, Mexicans of the 1810s recognized that citizens no longer derive their laws and rights from divine or monarchical authority but from the people and the consent of the governed. On this historic bicentennial of …
Late last week a federal district court in California struck down the military policy on service by homosexual persons, an activist ruling that, among other things, faulted the 1993 law on constitutional due process grounds. Next week the U.S. Senate is scheduled to take up the legislative repeal of the 1993 law using a process that limits amendments and ignores the expressed preferences of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all of whom have asked the Congress to wait for completion of the Defense Department review …
Yesterday marked the 40th birthday of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) Clean Air Act (CAA), and environmentalists celebrated by reminding us how beneficial the regulation has been at improving air quality in the U.S. Now the EPA wants to turn the Clean Air Act’s birthday party into an all-out rager by allowing them to do what elected officials could not: regulate carbon dioxide (CO2). First things first. Air quality was improving before the passage of the 1970 CAA. Environmentalists should give more credit to innovation and less to top-down regulation. …
