Most Popular
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Hyundai Motor eyes 80,000 jobs, W68tr investment at home by 2026
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Seoul bus drivers go on general strike, cause morning rush hour delays
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Korea enters full election mode
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Official campaigning kicks off for April 10 elections
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Dialogue hopes fade as doctors pick hard-liner as new head
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Coupang pledges W3tr to expand Rocket Delivery nationwide by 2027
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[Election Battlefield] Political novice to face off star politician in ‘swing district’
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Immigrant woman stabbed to death by Korean husband
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[Herald Interview] Son Suk-ku chooses to be swayed by others in navigating life
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Seoul’s bus union prepares for strike
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Congress plays with fire as Asia examines debt
The U.S. doesn’t deserve Asia’s money, not with half of its government in financial jihad mode, damn the global consequences.The biggest economy has long taken its reserve-currency status for granted, but the events of recent days raise Washington’s hubris to entirely new levels. Chinese President Xi Jinping didn’t mention Ted Cruz, John Boehner or the Tea Party this week when he urged major developed economies to adopt responsible policies that avoid negative spillover. He didn’t have to. Their
Oct. 4, 2013
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[Yoon Young-kwan] Filling global leadership vacuum
Has the world entered a new era of chaos? America’s vacillating policy toward Syria certainly suggests so. Indeed, the bitter legacy of the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by the 2008 financial crisis, has made the United States not only reluctant to use its military might, even when “red lines” are crossed, but also seemingly unwilling to bear any serious burden to maintain its global leadership position. But, if America is no longer willing to lead, who will take its place?China’s
Oct. 3, 2013
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Heroes and soldiers of the supreme court
As the Supreme Court prepares to begin its new term, observers have been discussing the familiar divisions among the justices. Judicial activism is opposed to judicial restraint, liberalism is opposed to conservatism, and those who believe in an evolving or “living” Constitution are opposed to those who believe that the document’s meaning was fixed when its provisions were originally ratified.But there is another division. For more than two centuries, the court’s members have adopted one of four
Oct. 3, 2013
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[Kor Kian Beng] China’s lenient ‘self-criticism’
The practice of public self-criticism ― de rigueur in the 1960s and 1970s during the Mao Zedong era ― has made a comeback under Chinese Communist Party supremo Xi Jinping.Last week, Chinese viewers watched as the main state broadcaster CCTV showed top officials of northern Hebei province giving themselves and each other a verbal lashing.Provincial party boss Zhou Benshun chided himself for his poor work ethic. Governor Zhang Qingwei admitted he “liked to criticize others.” A couple of senior off
Oct. 3, 2013
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Indonesia’s reluctance to remember September 1965
Horrible things happened in Indonesia between autumn 1965 and spring 1967. There is that eternal battle between memory and forgetting, a reality which reasserts itself when you go into any discussion of the horrors that were inflicted on Indonesians after Sept. 30, 1965. On the night of Sept. 30, the world was informed, a plot by the country’s communist party to seize power had ended up in the murder of six generals of the army. A seventh one survived. He was General Suharto. And he would go on
Oct. 3, 2013
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Learn from mistakes and stop the wastage
Malaysia’s Auditor-General’s Report 2012 tabled in parliament on Tuesday has once again thrown up the usual slew of cases involving mismanagement of funds to downright corruption.Some of the cases highlighted are bound to raise a chuckle or two, like how the customs department had to destroy 602,089 ringgit ($185,829) worth of shoes bought for its staff because they did not meet specifications.We are used to seeing customs destroying goods confiscated in the line of duty but to destroy 7,659 pai
Oct. 3, 2013
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Criminalizing anti-Buddhist acts is not very Buddhist
Is “Knowing Buddha” ― a group of Thai Buddhists who are relentlessly tackling what they see as a disrespectful act against the image of Buddha ― the new face of Thai Buddhism?The year-old group has been battling manufacturers of all sorts of products around the world that exploit the image of the Buddha to make money. The goods range from skateboards, lampstands, armchairs and underwear to bars named after the historical Buddha such as the Buddha Bar in Paris and Buddha Tattoo.While I sympathize
Oct. 3, 2013
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[Kim Myong-sik] Is bringing overseas artifacts home desirable?
Culture Minister Yoo Jin-ryong seems to have barely weathered a storm of public censure with sincere explanations about his alleged remarks hinting the possibility of returning to Japan Buddhist statues that a group of Koreans stole from Tsushima. He faced sudden embarrassment when the Japanese media quoted their Culture Minister Hakubun Shimomura, coming from a meeting with Korean and Chinese culture ministers in Gwangju last week, as saying that Korea would be considering sending the stolen ar
Oct. 2, 2013
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[Lee Jae-min] Cooperation from Bali to Bali
The problem of multilateral trade negotiations is that, increasingly, negotiators are confined to the mandates and directives of their governments, with little leeway at the negotiating table. That is just natural: What they say will be transcribed into official documents and what they agree to will be put into treaty texts which will remain legally binding until terminated. Under these circumstances, everything said and delivered should be tightly controlled.To the contrary, a forum designed to
Oct. 2, 2013
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[J. Bradford DeLong] The taper and its shadow
BERKELEY California ― The central banks of the North Atlantic region have vowed not to raise their short-term nominal interest rates until the economies under their stewardship show substantial recovery. So far, that has not happened. On the contrary, these economies continue to be battered by the fiscal headwinds of austerity; by uncertainty over whether America’s Republican Party will, in fact, undermine the “full faith and credit” of the United States by allowing the federal government to def
Oct. 1, 2013
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Are you worried about cancer? Get married
When I mentioned my bout with breast cancer to a new acquaintance, his first question was, “Are you married?”It was an unusual reaction ― a more common query is whether I have kids. Later he told me that his daughter-in-law had been diagnosed with breast cancer while still in graduate school and that she and his son had moved in with him. He understood better than most people that being married makes it easier to cope with cancer.The very next day the Journal of Clinical Oncology released a stud
Oct. 1, 2013
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[Kim Seong-kon] Amazing world of psychology and brain sciences
In the past few decades, scientists have successfully unveiled the mystery of the chromosome map and acquired unprecedented genetic engineering skills. Now they are beginning to make advances in brain science, which is closely related to psychology. In order to perceive how the human brain works and how humans behave, scientists are conducting various experiments. And the results are quite intriguing and enlightening. Psychology is now beginning to flourish in Korea. For example, psychology is a
Oct. 1, 2013
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Europe’s voters wisely stick with frugal leaders
For the last three years, the Anglo-American and south European news media have presented German Chancellor Angela Merkel as the scourge of the recession. But on Sept. 22, she won an overwhelming victory in Germany’s parliamentary elections. Her Christian Democratic Union obtained 41.5 percent of the votes cast, its best result since 1990, five seats short of a majority in the Bundestag.Her success should give us pause to reconsider what has happened in Europe since the global financial crisis e
Oct. 1, 2013
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The widening gulf between Americans and their military
Spending a couple of days at West Point, especially coming from Washington, is uplifting.The majesty of the setting high above the Hudson River ― where George Washington set up his headquarters in 1779 ― inspires. Compelling, too, is the character of the cadets at the U.S. Military Academy.Whether they are asking vigorous questions in social science class or displaying the precision of the Long Gray line on parade, the cadets inhabit a world imbued with the auras of Dwight Eisenhower, Douglas Ma
Oct. 1, 2013
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[Zaki Ladi] The global cooperation crisis
PARIS ― The rise of emerging economies worldwide has generated much optimism, in terms not only of economic development, but also of global cooperation. But the shift to a multipolar world order has not bolstered multilateralism. In fact, the opposite is true: the logic of national sovereignty has staged a comeback, with major economies consistently undermining cooperation on issues ranging from security to trade to climate change.Consider the muddle in the United Nations Security Council over S
Sept. 30, 2013
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A national family-leave law? It’s a start
Democrats are about to try, and almost certainly fail, to secure paid parental and family leave for most American workers. That could still be an achievement, if it starts a conversation about how to provide American workers with the flexibility they need to manage family needs.California and New Jersey, the two states with paid family leave programs, have shown how it can benefit not only mothers and children but also employers. In California, which has offered paid parental leave since 2004, m
Sept. 30, 2013
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Why China will disappoint pessimists yet again
China’s eagerly anticipated “hard landing” hasn’t happened yet, and recent indicators make me wonder (not for the first time) if it ever will. In the past two months, the Chinese economy has actually shown signs of accelerating.Constant pessimism in financial markets about the country’s prospects is only partly guided by economic analysis. There’s also the faith-based view that growth as rapid as China’s simply can’t go on ― and that a non-democratic country really shouldn’t expect to prosper. M
Sept. 30, 2013
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Economy cannot be all that’s slowing health costs
A new set of projections released last week by Medicare’s actuaries has drawn much attention, in part because it suggests the deceleration in the growth of health costs we’ve seen over the past few years is ephemeral. The actuaries attribute the slowdown to the “lingering effects of the economic downturn and sluggish recovery” and to increases in cost sharing.Both of these explanations have serious shortcomings ― and that, in turn, suggests something larger is in fact at work.The assertion that
Sept. 30, 2013
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[Naomi Wolf] Onstage confrontation between spies and scribes
NEW YORK ― The recent guilty plea by Donald Sachtleben, a former FBI bomb technician charged with leaking classified information, after government investigators identified him by secretly obtaining the phone logs of some Associated Press reporters, represents the latest chapter in the ongoing drama over United States security officials’ behavior.A few days earlier, another chapter played out in a New York City television studio: spies and recipients of leaked information confronted each other on
Sept. 30, 2013
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Shanghai free-trade zone is a symbol, not a threat
Hong Kong is dead. Economic roadkill on China’s way to world domination. Starting this weekend, a free-trade zone opening in Shanghai will supplant the former British colony as the gateway to the world’s most dynamic economy. That’s the chatter in the city of 7 million people, where some business leaders fear becoming China’s Chicago, long ago eclipsed by New York as a financial and cultural center. Shanghai’s new free-trade zone, opening for business Sept. 29 on 11 square miles of land, will of
Sept. 29, 2013