Most Popular
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Russia sent more than 165,000 barrels of refined petroleum to N. Korea in March: White House
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Key suspects grilled over alleged abuse of power in Marine death inquiry
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S. Korean children, teens grow taller, mature faster than before: study
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Army takes group action against Hybe for neglecting BTS
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Marine Corps commander summoned by CIO for questioning on alleged influence-peddling case
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[Graphic News] Number of coffee franchises in S. Korea rises 13%
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Some junior doctors are returning: Health Ministry
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[Robert J. Fouser] AI changes rationale for learning languages
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Ador CEO's request for exclusive right to terminate NewJeans' contract with Hybe refused in February
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Woman dangling from power lines rescued by residents holding blanket
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[Yu Kun-ha] Time for Korea to revamp its ‘pali pali’ culture
What will it take for Korea to upgrade its safety culture? The question is being raised again as the entire nation is gripped with sorrow over the tragic sinking on Wednesday of the ferry Sewol off the southern coast. Among the 476 passengers on board, only 174 have been rescued, with the remainder dead or still missing. But the disaster could have been avoided had the ship’s crew and the company that operated it paid more attention to safety. Investigators have tentatively concluded that the ma
April 20, 2014
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Is there a cure for conservatism?
Thanks to learned scientists, I’ve discovered that I suffer from a mental problem afflicting millions of Americans.It’s not really a disease. It’s more like a peculiarity, one that irritates polite society yet may be corrected with surgery to the frontal lobe. What is this deviancy?Conservatism.For many years now, conservatives have secretly feared the day when science would identify us as aberrant, or to use the vernacular, abby-normal.Sadly, that time has come, in the pages of the liberal-lean
April 20, 2014
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Kansas, the KKK and hate without end
The news that a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is suspected of shooting and killing three people near Jewish community centers in Kansas seems at first glance like a disparaged past flaring briefly into the present. Americans like to imagine that the KKK belongs to a long-gone South and anti-Semitism to a distant 20th century. Sadly, this better reflects a naive faith in the nation‘s history of religious tolerance than the realities experienced by many religious minorities. Although the
April 20, 2014
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[Robert Reich] The distributional games
Every year I ask the students in my “Wealth and Poverty” class to play a simple game. I have them split up into pairs and imagine that I’m giving one of them $1,000. They can keep some of the money only on condition they reach a deal with their partner on how it’s to be divided between them.I explain that they’re strangers who will never see one other again, can only make one offer and respond with one acceptance (or decline), and can only communicate by the initial recipient writing on a piece
April 18, 2014
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Cuban Twitter project was a tweet in the dark
PARIS ― First, Cubans would receive fun little text messages about baseball and music. Then, one day ― bam! ― they would learn via cell phone that they’d been living in a dictatorship for over half a century and would realize that it was time to overthrow the regime.Hopefully American taxpayers like the plot of this far-fetched geopolitical revenge fantasy, because they’ve already paid for it. It’s yet another example of technology encroaching on the valuable space once occupied by gray matter.T
April 18, 2014
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[Doyle McManus] Reading between the lines
Reading is such an improbable idea ― a miracle, really. Yet simple squiggles on a page, arranged just so, can convey ideas that change the way we think or introduce to us characters we love for a lifetime. In celebration of reading ― and of this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ― we asked four readers (who also happen to be writers) to celebrate books that mattered in their lives.If you want a friend in Washington, the saying goes, get a dog. But if you’re looking to understand Wash
April 17, 2014
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Why poverty across world matters to Americans
A child starving in South Sudan should matter to Americans.That was the message delivered last week by Nancy Lindborg, whose job at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is to lead a federal bureau spreading democracy and humanitarian assistance across the world.That world has reached a critical danger zone, with three high-level crises combining military conflict with humanitarian catastrophes affecting millions of innocents in Syria, the South Sudan and the Central African Repu
April 17, 2014
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Just what to do after work in Singapore?
The global financial crash of 2008 not only diminished the savings of workers nearing retirement, but it also altered mindsets about the work cycle. In America, most people have to work their way back to the point where they originally had been ready to call it a day. With welfarism squeezed after the Clinton reforms and European workers being put on notice of a tightening of benefits, retirement is becoming a misnomer in the West. Workers are bracing themselves to continue on the job for as lon
April 17, 2014
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[Kor Kian Beng] Xi still needs Deng’s approach
Capping a year of high-profile and at times provocative diplomatic moves that have stirred unease in Asia and beyond, Chinese President Xi Jinping recently described China as “a lion that has awakened.”That remark, which referenced Napoleon’s description of China as a sleeping lion, has prompted many to wonder if Xi intends to end late strongman Deng Xiaoping’s foreign policy strategy of taoguang yanghui or “hiding one’s capabilities and biding one’s time.” Some even think he has already done so
April 17, 2014
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We must stop using Songkran as an excuse
Think of Songkran and two things immediately come to mind: water-splashing fun and deadly road accidents. Midway through the “Seven Dangerous Days,” dozens have been killed in auto accidents, snuffing caretaker Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra’s hopes for “seven days of happiness.”Worse, the number of road accidents has risen. The first three days of the festival, Friday through Sunday, saw 1,539 accidents, compared with 1,446 last year. No surprise, then, that injuries rose from 1,526 in 2013
April 17, 2014
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Taiwan can’t count on the U.S. navy
A lot of noise was made in December after China sent its first aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, on a jaunt through the South China Sea. The deployment, termed a “training exercise” by the mainland government, caused great concern in Taiwan and Japan, coming shortly after Beijing’s controversial expansion of its Air Defense Identification Zone to include islands administered by Japan and claimed by China. The Liaoning, which is not fully operational yet, clipped Taiwan’s own ADIZ and one of its es
April 17, 2014
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[William Pesek] Japan’s backward reform drive
For Abenomics bulls who still hold out hope that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe intends to make good on his pledges to revitalize Japan, the past week must have been at least a little disconcerting.In that span, Abe unveiled a “new” energy plan, which in fact put to rest any notion that he might use the Fukushima nuclear accident as a spur to invest in renewables. Unveiled on April 11, Abe’s strategy instead promotes an unimaginative mix of nuclear and coal. Then, on Monday, the Japan Exchange Group
April 16, 2014
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Chernobyl factor in Ukraine crisis
LOS ANGELES ― Twenty-eight years after its Chernobyl nuclear plant exploded, Ukraine confronts a nuclear specter of a different kind: the possibility that the country’s reactors could become military targets in the event of a Russian invasion. Speaking at the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague in March, Andrii Deshchytsia, Ukraine’s acting foreign minister, cited the “potential threat to many nuclear facilities” should events deteriorate into open warfare.Earlier in the month, Ihor Prokopchuk,
April 16, 2014
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Nudging taxpayers to do the right thing
Most Americans comply with the tax laws, but every year many of our fellow citizens don’t. The result is the “tax gap” ― the amount of revenue that the government loses because people are cheating. In one recent year, for example, the tax gap was $450 billion. That’s a lot of money ― more than 10 times the budget of the State Department.What can be done to increase compliance? Remarkably, a short letter to delinquent taxpayers ― based on the findings of behavioral science ― can have large effect
April 16, 2014
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[Kim Myong-sik] Reports on North fail to exhibit good journalism
“Any report on the North is either a scoop or a fiction.” This is the sub-headline of an article in Kwanhun Journal 2014-Spring. The quarterly, published by the Kwanhun Club, a fraternity of senior journalists, devoted its latest issue to the problem of reporting on North Korea.We noticed yet another example of undesirable media practices ahead of the latest session of the North Korean legislature. Prior to the opening of the first session of the 13th term of the DPRK Supreme People’s Assembly i
April 16, 2014
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What Greece could tell us about Ukraine
As tensions escalate in the eastern part of Ukraine, the country’s officials are in Washington looking to put the finishing touches on an agreement with the International Monetary Fund that provides immediate financial relief and opens the doors to help from others. Given the situation on the ground, these already-complex negotiations must find a way to balance economic, political, security and social considerations. Also, the parties need to come up with a lot of money to cover the country’s fi
April 16, 2014
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[Lee Jae-min] The tale of two conflicting laws
With the completion of the domestic proceeding in Moscow to annex the Crimean peninsula after the referendum on March 16, the debates have now moved on to the realm of law. The United States and the EU claim that the annexation is in clear violation of international law. To which Russia counters that the annexation was consummated in compliance with international law and that instead it is Western states that are violating the legal norms. Here are a few details. Washington and Brussels point ou
April 15, 2014
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India’s election won’t be decided on old lines
Last week, India embarked on what has repeatedly been hailed as the biggest electoral exercise in history. But the bigger grinding noise seemed to come from hundreds of electoral pundits as they cranked up the machinery of received ideas. India’s future, these portentous commentators declared, would be decided by the winner of the three-way clash between Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi and Arvind Kejriwal. Or the older battle between secularism and Hindu nationalism. Or the one between free-market c
April 15, 2014
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[Kim Seong-kon] Returning from the London Book Fair
Last week I went to London with some of Korea’s finest writers to participate in the 2014 London Book Fair, to which South Korea had been invited as the Market Focus country. Thanks to the recent popularity of hallyu and advanced Korean technology represented by Samsung, LG and Hyundai, South Korea has become widely and favorably known throughout the world. Accordingly, Korea has been the guest of honor at major international book fairs, including those of Frankfurt in 2005, Beijing in 2012 and
April 15, 2014
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China’s Tibet conundrum: How to conquer a myth
Beijing has no shortage of issues to confront. There’s the South China Sea, uncontrollable corruption, a slowing economy and factional disputes within the party and military. But Chinese officials also face one of the most difficult challenges in modern statecraft: how to conquer a myth.Despite China’s attempts to dislodge its mythic appeal, Tibet as Shangri-La seems firmly set in the world’s imagination. The once-independent nation, set high on a broad plateau adjacent to the Himalayas, is a wo
April 15, 2014