New York Times (September 28)
“Strict enforcement should start with the president, to show that no American is above the law.” In 2010, Donald Trump “claimed a tax refund of $72.9 million,” which sparked an ongoing investigation. “The government must move urgently to resolve this question…. Americans deserve to know that the president has paid his taxes, too.”
Tags: Enforcement, Government, Investigation, Law, Strict, Tax refund, Trump, U.S., Urgent
South China Morning Post (June 30)
“How Hong Kong should cope with the national security law: keep calm and carry on…. It would be best for Hongkongers not to panic, but get on with their lives instead.”
Salt Lake Tribune (April 14)
The Trump administration has “no plan” to address the immigration crisis. “This president has done nothing but rant about his own failures both privately and publicly…. It is not hyperbole to say that the nation, through its top executive, has cast aside law and order in favor of despotism. The problem is that this president is not even a good despot.”
Washington Post (September 8)
“Washington feels like the capital of an occupied country,” filled with “institutional and administrative chaos; our military chain of command is compromised; people around the elected president feel impelled to act above the law and remove papers from his desk. The mechanisms meant to protect the state from an incompetent or dictatorial president are not being used because people in power no longer believe in them, or are afraid to use them. Washington feels like the capital of a state where the legal order has collapsed.”
Tags: Administrative, Chain of command, Chaos, Collapsed, Dictatorial, Elected, Incompetent, Institutional, Law, Legal order, Military, Occupied, Power, President, Protect, Washington
The Economist (May 19)
Unless European “companies or their governments take the fight all the way to the White House, they have little choice but to abide by the long—and sometimes wrong—arm of American law.” America’s threat of sanctions on companies doing business with Iran impacts major players including Total, Airbus, Peugeot, Renault and SWIFT. Still, it remains to be seen if “there is the stomach for such a battle.”
Tags: Airbus, European, Fight, Governments, Iran, Law, Peugeot, Renault, Sanctions, Swift, Threat, Total, White House
Bloomberg (September 20)
There has been “a huge and very worrying change in Japanese education policy….Essentially, Japan’s government just ordered all of the country’s public universities to end education in the social sciences, the humanities and law” with a non-binding order from Hakubun Shimomura, Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This is “a terrible direction for Japan to be going.” To succeed as a rich country in a service economy, Japan will need more conceptual thinkers who can communicate, rather than more engineers. “Japan needs to keep educating students in the social sciences and humanities. It needs to avoid a doomed attempt to return to a developing-country model of growth.”
Tags: Communicate, Conceptual thinkers, Education policy, Engineers Developing country, Government, Humanities, Japan, Law, MEXT, Rich, Service economy, Shimomura, Social sciences, Universities
Los Angeles Times (May 14)
“Judges on Europe’s highest court may have thought they were striking a blow for individual privacy when they ruled Tuesday that search engines could be ordered to stop linking to sensitive or older information about people online, even if it had been lawfully published. Instead, they were creating an entitlement to censor history, or at least to make parts of the public record harder to find.”
Tags: Censor, Europe, History, Judges, Law, Links, Privacy, Public record, Search engines
Chicago Tribune (March 11)
“No one steals and uses someone else’s passport for legitimate reasons. Only those who are inclined to violate the law and want to get away with it are given to this practice.” The role played by travelers with stolen passports on the ill-fated Malaysia Airlines flight remains unclear. What is perfectly clear is that authorities should “take the trouble to verify the identity of every person” by availing themselves of Interpol’s passport database. Currently, only a few countries make frequent use of this tool. Regrettably, more than one billion boardings went unscreened for misuse of lost/stolen passports last year.
Tags: Authorities, Boardings, Flight, Identity, Interpol, Law, Legitimate, Malaysia Airlines, Passports, Stolen, Travelers, Unscreened, Verify
Chicago Tribune (April 1)
“In the world’s most populous nation, attending to your filial obligations is no longer entirely up to your discretion. It’s a legal obligation.” In China, “the government has enacted a law mandating that children visit their parents and that employers give the children time off to do so. And if Junior shirks his duty, Mom and Dad can sue him to force compliance.”
Washington Post (April 2)
“Though some visitors to China, dazzled by the high-rises and humming factories, may miss the point, the true sources of long-run stability and prosperity, for any nation, are the rule of law and transparent government. China still has neither.”
Tags: China, Government, Law, Prosperity, Transparency
