Nguyen Van Giau sighs audibly and shifts in his chair when I ask him the dreaded question: Is Vietnam losing its inflation battle? It’s one the country’s central bank governor can barely go an hour without fielding these days. Such is life in a nation where consumer prices climbed almost 18 percent in April from a year earlier. Giau’s assurances that he’s committed to taming inflation aren’t re...

BANGKOK ― The military skirmishes between Thailand and Cambodia that have claimed more than two dozen lives, caused scores of injuries, and displaced tens of thousands of people since February are primarily attributable to domestic politics in both countries. Rooted in ancient enmities and the legacy of the colonial era, the fighting is damaging the entire region. So virulent is the dispute that ...

There is something surreal about Pakistani officials’ reaction to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Their focus has been wholly on the violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty by the U.S. raid, rather than the fact that bin Laden was living well in their country. The army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, warned he would not tolerate any repeat of such covert action; the country’s foreign secretary, Sa...

Even though the threat of a government shutdown is over for now, the federal services that Americans depend on are still at risk of disappearing. House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s proposal to reduce the deficit by gutting $375 billion from the federal government in the next 10 years would severely threaten the important work of the nation’s federal workforce. As would the recommendations put fo...

The American mission in Afghanistan changed with two quick shots from a Navy SEAL last Sunday. The calls for reflection on the nature of the war on terror with the death of Osama bin Laden have merit. Al-Qaida and its leader were the reasons behind 100,000 U.S. troops facing daily dangers. In a world without bin Laden, the terror war could be as legitimately staged in Somalia, Yemen or Iran. E...

The cardinal sin of political prognostication is static analysis. A short weekend ago the emerging wisdom was that President Barack Obama’s reelection was in peril. The House Republican whip, Kevin McCarthy of California, perhaps the most politically attuned elected member of his party, was saying that while he always believed Republicans would have a good year in 2012, he now thought it was lik...

Mark Zuckerberg shouldn’t lose too much sleep about China’s Facebook beating him to Wall Street. Renren Inc. is the first social-networking website to go public in the U.S., raising $743 million with which founder Joseph Chen can tap China’s 1.3 billion people. China is a market Facebook Inc. has yet to friend and the U.S. equity market is a place Zuckerberg has yet to tread. Here’s the thing, ...

Last year, California added 28 inmates to the state’s death row, eight of whom were sentenced in Los Angeles County. They aren’t in much danger of an early demise, however, thanks largely to legal delays, including a decision Tuesday by state officials not to pursue executions in 2011. The seemingly never-ending court battles mean that convicts in capital cases are far more likely to die of natur...

Although the Americans have been gloatingly bandying about the death of Osama bin Laden since their “successful” operation at Abbottabad on Monday (May 2), doubts have continued to persist about the man whom they had identified as al-Qaida’s chief before taking his life. In fact, the burial of the body at sea tends to reinforce the suspicion of a questionable identity of the murdered person; if p...

In evaluating Osama bin Laden’s dubious legacy, it is important to note that there was nothing new about religiously inspired terrorism when this rich Saudi exile convened a small group of jihadists in his Peshawar, Pakistan, home in 1988 to found al-Qaida ― an organization designed to carry on the war waged so successfully against the Red Army in Afghanistan. Two of the earliest known terrorist...