Democratic Congressman Dennis Kucinich raises the possibility of impeaching President Barack Obama for aggressive air strikes against Libya, while Mitt Romney, a potential Republican presidential candidate, says the policy shows the commander in chief to be “tentative, indecisive, timid and nuanced.” Obama can brush aside these criticisms. Every modern president would have been impeached under K...

The more someone purports to know what’s in Kim Jong-il’s mind, the more skeptical you should be. What about the North Korean dictator’s heart? This question is much on the minds of Japanese after Kim donated $500,000 to help their nation deal with a record earthquake and tsunami. The gesture is as fascinating as its timing. It came on the same day a United Nations agency said Kim urgently needs...

For children who have suffered mental trauma as a result of the recent earthquake and tsunami, school can be a valuable forum in which to talk to friends and teachers and encourage each other. The situation remains severe in devastated areas, with no clear prospects for reconstruction, but we hope initial steps will be taken to put school life back in order. The March 11 disaster left enormous ...

I was a senior in college when Facebook came online. I got an account immediately, and a year later interviewed the founders for a magazine article oh-so-cleverly headlined “In Your FACE!” Clearly, I should’ve booked the next flight to Palo Alto and begged for stock options, but they struck me as arrogant. “Who do they think they are?” I thought. “They just run a little college website!” OK, I ...

Here’s a crucial fact that you may not realize, given the week’s headlines: Libya is only a tragic sideshow to the historic events in the Middle East. Egypt is the place that counts when we consider the prospects for Arab democracy. Bahrain is the locale where Iran and the Saudis are contesting for power. Yemen, whose president is about to fall, is the country where a strong al-Qaida branch is b...

Falling house prices and a backlog of foreclosures have turned 2011 into the most desperate year yet for many American homeowners. The pain just keeps coming, and government programs have proven ineffective at assisting many of those in danger of losing their houses. In the short run, now would be the worst time to strip away government subsidies that support many of those same beleaguered house...

You know things are bad when pop stars a world away get more fired up about a humanitarian crisis than a nation’s own leaders. Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan would no doubt take umbrage at this assertion. Many of Japan’s 126 million residents wouldn’t, as television cameras that had been fixed on the nuclear fiasco in Fukushima turn further north. We are getting an eyeful of millions in earth...

With the current military operation in Libya, the U.S. has taken on a third campaign for forcible regime change in the Middle East. No matter how we might try to convince ourselves otherwise ― that we are only “protecting civilians” or “implementing the will of the international community” ― Libya now joins Afghanistan and Iraq as cases where the U.S. military is using force to bring down a Musl...

Amid all the hysteria about nuclear meltdowns and radiation poisoning, here’s something to consider: U.S. commercial reactors have never caused a single death. Worldwide, nuclear power has the lowest accident rate based on the amount of energy generated by any source. Compare that record with the havoc caused by dam failures and the disease and deaths wreaked by fossil-fuel pollution and explosi...