The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed Kenyan elections, the scramble to assemble a new government in Italy, and the sixtieth anniversary of Stalin’s death. Read more »

Glass ceilings are made to be broken. And today Park Geun-hye smashed one when she became the first woman to be sworn in as president of South Korea. Park defeated her left-of-center opponent, Moon Jae-in of the Democratic United Party (DUP), back in December with nearly 52 percent of the vote. To put that accomplishment in perspective, less than 16 percent of the seats in South Korea’s National Assembly are held by women, which places it 105^th among legislatures worldwide, while 97 percent of senior government positions are held by men. Park’s ride into the Blue House was helped by the fact that she is the daughter of Park Chung-hee, the economic modernizer and military dictator who dominated South Korean politics from the time he took power in a coup in 1961 until his assassination in 1979. Many older South Koreans remember him fondly for lifting the country out of poverty, but liberal politicians and many younger South Koreans despise him for cruelly repressing his political opponents. Unlike her father, Park Guen-hye will have just a single five-year term to put her mark on South Korea. Read more »

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed the sequester, Pope Benedict XVI’s farewell, and the foreign policy-themed films nominated for the Oscar for Best Picture. Read more »

Happy Presidents’ Day. To get you in the proper celebratory mood, TWE presents its second Presidents’ Day quiz. You can find the answers at the bottom of the post. Yes, you could Google the questions to find the answers. But that’s not much fun. By all means, if you have your own presidential trivia questions, please post them in the comments section so everyone can take a crack at answering them. And if you are feeling up to it, you can try last year’s presidential trivia quiz.
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Monday is Presidents’ Day. It is a TWE tradition to recognize the forty-three men—and they have all been men—who have been president on Presidents’ Day with the following essay. Enjoy the three-day weekend:

A few presidents have loved the job. Teddy Roosevelt said “No president has ever enjoyed himself as much as I have enjoyed myself.” Most other presidents, though, have found the job demanding, perhaps too demanding. James K. Polk pretty much worked himself to exhaustion. Zachary Taylor, the hero of the Mexican-American War, found being president harder than leading men into battle. Dwight Eisenhower had a heart attack from the stress of leading the Free World.Many presidents express relief once they can be called “former president.” This trend started early. John Adams told his wife Abigail that George Washington looked too happy watching him take the oath of office. “Me–thought I heard him say, ‘Ay, I am fairly out and you fairly in! See which of us will be happiest!” Read more »

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed Italy’s upcoming elections, the NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Brussels, and the UN Security Council discussion on North Korea. Read more »

The World Next Week podcast is up. Bob McMahon and I discussed President Obama’s State of the Union address, European Central Bank (ECB) president Mario Draghi’s speech to the Spanish parliament, and reconciliation talks in Bahrain. Read more »