Kelly Ernby was no doubt a good person, a friend to her friends, a companion to her husband, a crime-fighting prosecutor. She presumably had all the decent qualities we usually celebrate after a person dies, when we generally say only the kindest things we can think of. But she was also a vocal critic of vaccine mandates whose posts on social media risked lives, denied science and confused Americans. She was an activist with a mini-megaphone -- an Orange County deputy district attorney, a local

South Korean defense authorities suffered a serious loss of face at the beginning of the year when a young man crossed the high fences on the heavily guarded Demilitarized Zone to escape to North Korea a little more than a year after he made a similar adventure in a reverse direction. The incident tarnished the finale of President Moon Jae-in’s five-year epic of inter-Korean reconciliation. The Defense Ministry identified him as a Mr. X who had “defected” to the South from th

NEW YORK -- Although COVID-19 has been hard on everyone, it has not been an “equal opportunity” disease. The virus poses a greater threat to those who are already in poor health, many of whom are concentrated in poor countries with weak public-health systems. Moreover, not every country can spend one-quarter of its GDP to protect its economy, as the United States did. Developing and emerging economies have faced hard financial and fiscal constraints. And because of vaccine nationalis

Dear Presidential Candidates of South Korea, We hope you realize that 2022 is a crucial and pivotal year for your country for many reasons. As you know, South Korea is now facing unprecedented crises both internally and externally. Whoever is elected as the next president will therefore face the challenging task of skillfully navigating the “S.S. Republic of Korea” in a stormy sea, sailing the narrowest of straits between Scylla and Charybdis. As such, the Korean people expect yo

Since the COVID-19 pandemic started in 2020 and the federal government began using extraordinary measures to support workers, households and businesses, Republicans have been concerned that expanding the eligibility and generosity of unemployment benefits could slow the recovery and keep workers on the sidelines. So why have a handful of Republican-led states now extended unemployment benefits to workers who have lost their jobs because of failing to comply with vaccine mandates, with other sta

Protests that began in western Kazakhstan over a sharp rise in fuel costs have turned into days of upheaval, with demonstrators storming government buildings and the airport in Almaty, the country’s largest. That’s bad enough for President Vladimir Putin, who is wary of unrest on Russia’s fringes. But the crisis in what has been one of the region’s most stable countries is not about inflation alone. It’s a more volatile anger over rampant elite corruption, slow chan