Most Popular
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Tensions heighten ahead of first president-opposition chief meeting
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Seoul to provide housing subsidy to married couples with newborns
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[KH Explains] No more 'Michael' at Kakao Games
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Rapper jailed after public street fight with another rapper
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Woman gets suspended term for injuring boyfriend with knife
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Samsung chief bolsters ties with Germany’s Zeiss
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NewJeans pops out ‘Bubble Gum’ video amid troubles at agency
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Nominee for chief of anti-corruption body pledges 'independence, effectiveness'
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Med schools expect 1,500+ new admission slots next year
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KT launches new mobile plans for foreign residents
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Plenty of lessons from government shutdown
President Obama and the Democrats won; Republicans and the “tea party” lost. And both sides are gearing up for next time.Now that our recent brush with financial crisis is behind us, it’s time to start planning for the next one.That’s the problem Congress set up in the stopgap deal that ended the 16-day government shutdown and averted a collision with the debt ceiling. After all the sound and fury, the two parties agreed only on continuing federal spending at its current level until Jan. 15 and
Oct. 23, 2013
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[Howard Davies] JPMorgan highlights ‘too-big-to-fail’ problem
PARIS ― JPMorgan Chase has had a bad year. Not only has the bank just reported its first quarterly loss in more than a decade; it has also agreed to a tentative deal to pay a fine of $13 billion to the U.S. government as punishment for mis-selling mortgage-backed securities. Other big legal and regulatory costs loom. JPMorgan will bounce back, of course, but its travails have reopened the debate about what to do with banks that are “too big to fail.”In the United States, policymakers chose to in
Oct. 23, 2013
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The ozone treaty that banned your asthma inhaler
The Food and Drug Administration has outlawed the only over-the-counter asthma medicine in the U.S. It has also banned a number of other asthma medicines that patients like and that doctors have prescribed for them.In imposing these prohibitions, the FDA hasn’t denied that the banned asthma medicines are safe and effective for their intended use. (Disclosure: While serving as administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs during President Barack Obama’s first term,
Oct. 23, 2013
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Low-wage jobs in America generate public costs
After two years working at a St. Louis Wendy’s, Alisha Snider still cannot afford basics like rent, food, clothes and daycare for her three daughters. The 26-year-old earns only $7.50 an hour and works just 20 hours a week. So how does Alisha make ends meet? She puts her kids in a taxpayer-funded daycare program and uses $398 a month in food stamps to feed them.New research we published Tuesday shows Alisha is far from alone. It might come as a surprise that most Americans on public assistance p
Oct. 23, 2013
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[Trudy Rubin] Egypt’s struggle for democracy
Should America still be trying to promote democracy abroad ― especially when its own is so dysfunctional?This question has been nagging at me since the Obama administration announced a partial freeze on military aid to Egypt this month. The aim: to (belatedly) display U.S. displeasure over the Egyptian military’s bloody ouster of an elected president in July. (The aid will be restored if Egypt makes progress toward an “inclusive” elected government.)The cutoff was avidly pushed by both Republica
Oct. 22, 2013
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Race should be a factor in college admissions
Anybody who has ever encountered the college admissions process knows that there’s no such thing as an even playing field. Most schools will admit that upfront. “Like all colleges,” Harvard College notes on its own admissions website, “we seek to admit the most interesting, able, and diverse class possible.”In other words, schools often try to balance out an incoming class with students who not only have good grades or high test scores but have had unusual life experiences as well as those they
Oct. 22, 2013
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[Kim Seong-kon] The importance of diplomacy
Korea used to be called “a country of courteous people in the East.” According to the epithet, the Korean people valued politesse, courtesy and propriety in the past. Korea was also known as the “Hermit Kingdom” and “the Land of the Morning Calm.” Such descriptions indicate that the Korean people were traditionally a peaceful, reclusive people living in a serene country unknown to the rest of the world. Modern Koreans, however, seem to be neither particularly courteous, nor reclusive. Indeed, fe
Oct. 22, 2013
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Why hasn’t Asia produced its own Facebook?
As with so many other industries ― medical tourism, electric cars, phablets ― Asia is widely considered to be the future of the Internet. There is, however, one very big “if”: If only the continent’s governments can get over their tendencies toward overregulation and censorship.Almost half the world’s Web users live in the region. Asia boasts some of the world’s fastest broadband speeds, as well as the fastest rate of growth in mobile broadband. Its share of the global e-commerce market stands a
Oct. 22, 2013
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On Food Day, let’s commit to making kids healthier
Oct. 24 is Food Day, a time to reflect on the foods we ― and our kids ― eat.There are 17.9 million food insecure households, 3.9 million of whom have children. Yet, more than one-third of U.S. children and adolescents are overweight or obese. Ironically, food insecurity often contributes to obesity.So does lack of proper education about food and nutrition. On average, U.S. students get less than four hours of food education per year. Millions of kids aren’t learning about the importance of fresh
Oct. 22, 2013
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Prospect of subcontinent peace still gloomy
NEW DELHI ― Recent incidents on the Line of Control ― the frontier between India and Pakistan in the state of Jammu and Kashmir ― have again raised fundamental questions about the nuclear-armed neighbors’ fraught relationship. Early this month, India’s army foiled an attempted incursion by a group of 30 to 40 militants from Pakistani territory, leading Indian critics to decry official peace overtures. Indeed, barely two weeks before the latest incident, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh met w
Oct. 22, 2013
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[David Ignatius] How the GOP can recover
WASHINGTON ― Many Republicans have been muttering over the last few weeks of political craziness that the tea party’s hold on the GOP must be broken to protect their party’s future health ― not to mention, the country’s. So I’ve been asking Republicans what a movement to break the extremists’ power would actually look like. I put the question to a half-dozen prominent Republican strategists and analysts, and to one particularly influential Democrat, David Plouffe. The answers convince me that a
Oct. 21, 2013
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More must be done to close gender gap
World leaders have long recognized the value of empowering women, for their sake and to help achieve such long-term social goals as eradicating poverty, educating children, combating disease and protecting the environment. But how much progress toward gender equality is being made?This is a question that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has pledged to answer ― by 2015, the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking United Nations conference on gender issues in Beijing.It’s a great idea to m
Oct. 21, 2013
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[Jeffrey Frankel] African leaders eye world’s most valuable award
CAMBRIDGE ― On Oct. 14, the Mo Ibrahim Prize Committee announced that for the second year in a row it had not found anyone to whom to award its Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. Why is that important?The prize is given to a recently retired African head of state or government who was democratically elected, stepped down at the end of his or her constitutionally mandated term, and demonstrated exceptional leadership. The winner receives $5 million paid over 10 years, followed by $200,0
Oct. 21, 2013
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In praise of debt ceilings
MUNICH ― The wrangling about raising the U.S. government’s borrowing limit ― now thankfully over, at least for a few months ― underscores the hazards posed by excessive state indebtedness. Governments nowadays are essentially running gigantic redistribution machines that steer funds from taxpayers to transfer recipients and other beneficiaries of public expenditure. The latter permanently ask for more, while the former zealously try to defend their purse.In the end, the solution to this “redistr
Oct. 21, 2013
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Washington politics seen through research on spiders
As our politicians in Washington stopped devouring each other for just a few days, I decided to reach out to an expert.A man who studies extinction, and is wise in the ways of aggressive and docile species that eat meat.Jonathan Pruitt, biologist, is an assistant professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Pittsburgh. He doesn’t study politicians, per se. He studies eight-legged creatures, some poisonous, with hair on their backs and mouths that open sideways: Spiders.There are about 42
Oct. 21, 2013
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[Robert B. Reich] House Tea Party’s big mistake
Democrats aren’t unscathed from these past weeks of shuttered government and potential default, but polls show Republicans have taken a shellacking.Republicans who tried to hijack America didn’t understand one very basic thing. While most Americans don’t like big government, Americans revere our system of government. That’s why even though a majority still disapprove of the Affordable Care Act, a majority also disapproved of Republican tactics for repealing or delaying it.Government itself has n
Oct. 20, 2013
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Did Congress learn anything from shutdown?
House Republicans should consider themselves lucky to have wound up empty-handed after triggering a 16-day government shutdown and threatening to turn the United States into a deadbeat borrower. Had Senate leaders not rushed to the rescue, cutting a deal on a bill to reopen the government and lift the debt limit before Thursday’s deadline, the damage to the economy could have been enormous ― with the political fallout landing mainly on the House GOP, especially its uncompromising cadre of tea pa
Oct. 20, 2013
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[Jim Yong Kim] How Ho Chi Minh City’s filthy canal became a park
Sewers and storm drains don’t stir most people’s deepest passions. But try creating a modern, economically vibrant city without them.Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s economic capital, has spent the past decade building a modern sanitation and flood control system for the 1.2 million people living along its Nhieu Loc-Thi Nghe canal. Cleaning up this once-filthy waterway and creating new sanitation infrastructure has changed the face of the city, transforming it into a model for improving urban infrast
Oct. 20, 2013
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Yes, Canada has spies, too
PARIS ― From the same people who brought you the “National Security Agency Spies on Foreigners” shocker, we now have the “Canada Is Secretly Devious” spectacle. Apparently it’s a shock for some people ― namely, journalist Glenn Greenwald, the buddy of NSA contractor turned Russian defector Edward Snowden ― to discover how the world has always worked. I’m truly sorry (as we native Canadians tend to be), but color me unfazed and maybe even slightly miffed.Greenwald worked with Brazil’s Globo newsp
Oct. 20, 2013
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Syria’s no-solution solution to end conflict
BERLIN ― The Russian-American plan to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons ― now embodied in the United Nations Security Council Resolution 2118 ― may open a more constructive approach to ending the country’s civil war, because the Security Council is also demanding that the long-planned Geneva II conference on Syria convene as soon as possible. Rightly so: elimination of Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpiles and a political process to end the war must occur simultaneously.As a practical matter, eff
Oct. 20, 2013