Most Popular
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Korea enters full election mode
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Seoul bus drivers go on general strike, cause morning rush hour delays
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Immigrant woman stabbed to death by Korean husband
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Official campaigning kicks off for April 10 elections
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Lee Jong-sup resigns as envoy to Australia
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Yellow dust engulfs S. Korea, advisory alert issued
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S. Korea to boost support for single-parent families
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Court upholds jail term for man who attempted to murder ex-girlfriend
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Kia EV9 wins world car of year
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Korea misses out on global bond index boost
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[David Ignatius] Obama needs to think big
WASHINGTON ― There’s a telling moment at the beginning of Robert A. Caro’s new book when Lyndon Johnson’s advisers are gathered four days after he has become president to draft his first speech to Congress. Capitol Hill is divided, the country is grieving from the assassination of his predecessor, and some of LBJ’s advisers are urging him to take it slow. “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” Johnson replies. Barack Obama will be getting advice by the boatload over the next few weeks but t
Nov. 8, 2012
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Llosa makes good case against ‘Show’ culture
Nobel Prize laureate Mario Vargas Llosa says in a new book that we are living in a “culture of entertainment” in which everything ― including literature, journalism, politics and sex ― is becoming increasingly trivial, and that this phenomenon can have disastrous consequences to mankind.So when I interviewed him last week about “La Civilizacion del Espectaculo,” a collection of essays that has not been released in English yet, but whose title loosely translates as “The Show Culture,” I couldn’t
July 15, 2012
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Loosening the online muzzle on journalists
To the mainstream news business, social media are both an opportunity and an irritant. They enable reporters to learn more and learn it more quickly, and furnish them with spiffy new channels to people they wouldn’t otherwise reach. New media accelerate the creation and spread of news, and enrich the news diet by welcoming nontraditional sources to step up and tell what they know.But social media like Facebook, Twitter and its messaging brethren also are annoyances to legacy media. They fuel riv
June 24, 2012
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[Meghan Daum] Attack of the flesh-eating bacteria story
What spreads almost as fast as necrotizing fasciitis, a.k.a. flesh-eating infection? News stories about it.Surely by now you’ve heard about the horrifying case of Aimee Copeland, the 24-year-old Georgia graduate student who cut her leg on May 1 and was on life support by May 4. When Copeland regained consciousness, much of the plugged-in world knew what she still did not: Her left leg had been amputated, skin on her abdomen had been removed and she still risked losing her right foot and all 10 f
May 29, 2012
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[Kim Seong-kon] A land of mystery, contradictions, logical fallacies
In the eyes of foreigners, Korea must be a land of mystery in many respects. Once a destitute country ravaged by war and military dictatorships, South Korea has now achieved both unprecedented democratization and astonishing economic success called the “Miracle of the Han River” in the short span of 60 years. As a result, these days the Korean people can thoroughly enjoy freedom of speech and press, and frequently encounter Hyundai and KIA cars, Samsung smartphones and LG appliances when traveli
May 29, 2012
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A universal digital library is within reach
Since 2002, at first in secret and later with great fanfare, Google has been working to create a digital collection of all the world’s books, a library that it hopes will last forever and make knowledge far more universally accessible.But from the beginning, there has been an obstacle even more daunting than the project’s many technical challenges: copyright law.Ideally, a digital library would provide access not only to books free from copyright constraints (those published before 1923), but al
May 3, 2012
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[David Ignatius] Assessing bin Laden’s legacy
WASHINGTON ― In the year since Osama bin Laden’s death, it has been a comforting thought for Westerners to say that he failed. And that’s certainly true in terms of al-Qaeda, whose scorched-earth jihad tactics alienated Muslims along with everyone else. But in terms of bin Laden’s broader goal of moving the Islamic world away from Western influence, he has done better than we might like to think. Egypt is a case in point: This has been a year of mostly nonviolent democratic revolution. But it ha
May 2, 2012
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A Crisis in Full Flight
For a while, it looked as if the European Central Bank’s 1 trillion euro credit program to pump liquidity into Europe’s banking system had calmed global financial markets. But now interest rates for Italian and Spanish government bonds are on the rise again, closing in on about 6 percent.Of course, this may not be the breaking point beyond which the debt burden becomes unsustainable. After all, interest rates in Southern Europe were well above 10 percent in the decade before the euro was introdu
April 30, 2012
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How good business can lift Apple’s share price
Early this month, Adrian Kingsley- Hughes made this prediction on Forbes.com: “It seems quite possible for Apple stock to hit four digits in the next couple of years, barring any missteps.” The author probably imagines future missteps such as overheating iPads, a possible unsuccessful foray into the television-set market, or the failure of the company’s new chief executive officer, Tim Cook, to live up to the legacy of Steve Jobs. Yet it is easy to imagine a whole different set of problems, such
April 17, 2012
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U.S. can help Iraq help itself to stay on democratic path
Iraq is on a path leading away from the reasonably democratic model the U.S. hoped to leave behind. President Nouri al-Maliki is on a power trip. More broadly, his government is pushing laws that would constrain freedoms fundamental to a democracy. Maliki, a Shiite, has gone after leading Sunni politicians, most notably issuing an arrest warrant, on what seem to be trumped-up murder charges, for Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, now a fugitive. In response, Hashimi’s Sunni-dominated party, a part
April 17, 2012
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Saying goodbye to Greece -- as hordes of young people do the same
I traveled to Greece to see the land of my fathers, to see its beauty and its economic crisis firsthand.But as I arrived, others were leaving.Especially Greece‘s young people, suffering from unemployment that hovers around 50 percent.“They go to Australia or Turkey or wherever they can find work,” says my first cousin Sophia, a mother of two daughters who is fearful of the future.Every day here, as a handful on the hard left throw rocks in the streets, the stories get worse and worse. Many invol
April 16, 2012
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The radical message of 'Girls'
When I was 24 and living in a funky New York City apartment with roommates, roaches and ambitions that were both utterly consuming and utterly unfocused, I was convinced my generation was cursed. It was the early 1990s, and between a recession, the AIDS crisis and the last vestiges of the crack-and-crime epidemic, daily life had a certain apocalyptic quality.Thanks to baby boomers bottlenecking the middle rungs of the corporate ladder, we’d never move up from our entry-level jobs. Thanks to real
April 16, 2012
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[David Ignatius] Obama’s signal to Iran for talks
WASHINGTON ― President Barack Obama has signaled Iran that the U.S. would accept an Iranian civilian nuclear program if Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei can back up his recent public claim that his nation “will never pursue nuclear weapons.” This verbal message was sent through Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who visited Khamenei two weeks ago. A few days before traveling to Iran, Erdogan had held a two-hour meeting with Obama in Seoul, in which they discussed what Erdogan would tell the
April 12, 2012
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We‘re weary of ’being Trayvon‘
In the wake of the media blackout imposed two weeks ago by Angela Corey, the newly appointed special prosecutor investigating February’s fatal shooting of black Florida teen Trayvon Martin, the media has had no choice but to cover the story surrounding the story. This would include the widespread public demonstrations, the evolution of the “hoodie” as a symbolic rallying point, and the emergence of protest T-shirts adorned with phrases like “I Am Trayvon” and “Justice for Trayvon,” both of which
April 9, 2012
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[David Ignatius] From Pakistan, answers needed
WASHINGTON ― Let’s see if we’ve got the numbers straight: Osama bin Laden lived in five houses in Pakistan, fathered four children there, kept three wives who took dictation for his rambling directives to his terror network, had two children born in public hospitals ― and through it all, the Pakistani government did not know one single thing about his whereabouts? Can this possibly be true? I suppose that if U.S. intelligence officials could fail to connect the dots about the 9/11 plot, then per
April 8, 2012
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The ‘Bully’ documentary deserved an R rating
The news media has been abuzz recently about the Motion Picture Association of America’s decision to adopt an R rating for the film documentary “Bully,” and understandably so. School bullying has reached epidemic proportions, and with the rise in social media, bullying insidiously follows children from the schoolyard into their homes, their dorm rooms and their computers.A long list of Hollywood celebrities, sports stars, members of Congress and just plain folks denounced the MPAA for assigning
April 4, 2012
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‘Bully’ deserved an R
The news media has been abuzz recently about the Motion Picture Association of America‘s decision to adopt an R rating for the film documentary “Bully,” and understandably so. School bullying has reached epidemic proportions, and with the rise in social media, bullying insidiously follows children from the schoolyard into their homes, their dorm rooms and their computers.A long list of Hollywood celebrities, sports stars, members of Congress and just plain folks denounced the MPAA for assigning
April 4, 2012
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Keeping nuclear bombs from terrorists’ hands
We have just had the second Nuclear Security Summit, in Seoul. It got surprisingly little attention from the international media although 53 countries attended it. For the media, nuclear weapons are yesterday’s issue because nobody expects a nuclear war. But a nuclear weapon in terrorist hands is the defining nightmare of the post-9/11 decade, and that’s what the summit was actually about.“It would not take much, just a handful or so of these (nuclear) materials, to kill hundreds of thousands of
April 3, 2012
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What rich Asian women want for their money
Women in Asia are building and inheriting more wealth than ever before. According to Boston Consulting Group (BSG) 2010 report, the percentage of wealth controlled by women in Asia (except Japan) is rising nearing 30 percent annually and total wealth controlled by women reached $914 billion in 2010. Their heightened visibility in financial circles can be traced to more women achieving success in the workforce and a greater number of women actively managing family finances. Kim Sung-Joo recently
April 3, 2012
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Lamenting lack of true statesmen
As election day is just around the corner, our politicians have become desperate and are coming up with all sorts of lies to rake in as many votes as possible. In fact, they are so desperate that they are willing to do just about anything to get elected. Judging by their behavior, these politicians seem to resemble drug addicts. A former National Assembly member once confessed that political power is like narcotics: Once you get a taste, you will be intoxicated and eventually addicted. Afterward
April 3, 2012