Most Popular
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1 in 3 Koreans live alone, family types becoming diverse
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Korea, Japan finance chiefs vow to tame rampant FX market volatility
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US 'incredibly concerned' about suspected NK-Iran military ties
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K-pop group's manager dismissed for setting up spycam in theater dressing room
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K-pop singer lost consciousness after being hit by foul ball, cancels show
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Korean Muslim YouTuber's plan to build mosque in Incheon goes viral
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Why is Apple Pay struggling to get purchase in Korea?
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Yoon's office denies considering liberal figures for key posts
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Seoul says Fu Bao loan 'not going to happen'
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Contentious grain bill put directly to plenary meeting for vote
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In China, dead pigs with morning tea is nothing new
There are worse things than learning, as the residents of Shanghai did this week, that the source of the water for your morning shower and tea was contaminated by at least 5,916 dead pigs. You might find out that lamb you ate for dinner was duck soaked in toxic chemicals. That those dumplings you had as a late-night snack were fried in oil recovered from a gutter running beside an open sewer. Or worse yet, that the baby formula you’ve fed your newborn is laced with a plasticizer that damages kid
March 13, 2013
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Grief’s five stages explain post-quake Japan
The second anniversary of Japan’s monstrous earthquake has me thinking about Elisabeth Kuebler-Ross. The five stages of grief outlined in her 1969 book, “On Death and Dying,” aptly capture where the collective Japanese psyche has journeyed, and where it hasn’t, in the 24 months since a 9-magnitude quake and giant tsunami forever changed the relationship between nature and the nuclear reactors in the nation’s midst. I first learned about Kuebler-Ross from my mother, a bereavement counselor and Ca
March 13, 2013
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[Peter Singer] The ethics of big food firms
PRINCETON ― Last month, Oxfam, the international aid organization, launched a campaign called “Behind the Brands.” The goal is to assess the transparency of the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage companies concerning how their goods are produced, and to rate their performance on sensitive issues like the treatment of small-scale farmers, sustainable water and land use, climate change, and exploitation of women.Consumers have an ethical responsibility to be aware of how their food is produced,
March 13, 2013
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A zillion banks, one set of rules for them
Shortly after the financial crisis spread around the globe like a plague, the world’s leaders developed what they thought would be an antidote. Working through the Group of 20, they agreed to adopt common rules for all financial companies, no matter where they operated. The global system would be less risky, the thinking went, if derivatives dealing, an opaque $639 trillion market, worked more like stock trading on exchanges. If large banks had more capital, they would be able to absorb losses s
March 12, 2013
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[Daniel Fiedler] Inadequate law professors
It is an aphorism in Western society that those who cannot work successfully in their chosen profession often resort to teaching the very same discipline. While this statement does injustice to the numerous teachers who passionately pursue their chosen field of education, it is uncannily accurate in describing the faculty of South Korean law schools. The accuracy of the aphorism stems from the fact that the vast majority of law professors in South Korea were unable to pass the South Korean bar e
March 12, 2013
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Fancy footwear and austerity won’t save Portugal
Anyone still in need of proof that austerity isn’t fixing the euro area’s debt crisis should visit Portugal. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese took to the streets of Lisbon to protest against economic austerity on March 2, and the only surprise is that they didn’t do so earlier. Portugal is the euro area’s clearest example of how austerity is killing the patient, with the ill effects of counterproductive fiscal retrenchment unfolding before our eyes. We rarely hear about Portugal’s economic tr
March 12, 2013
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Social networks like getting pimples again
Social networking makes teenagers of us all. Lots of my ridiculously successful friends ― some of whom appear regularly on television, give TED talks and are the kind of people who get harassed in restaurants by their fans (while my fans remain remarkably good-mannered and never, ever come over to introduce themselves or say a word) ― will still not permit themselves to have a Facebook account because the thought of people unfriending them is terrifying.One of these women ― you would recognize h
March 12, 2013
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[Kim Seong-kon] We need to stand up to the bullies next door
There is a saying in English, “You cannot choose your neighbor.” Indeed, it seems luck can determine whether or not you have a good neighbor. If you are unlucky, you have to either put up with your bad neighbor or move to another place. Perhaps that is why people say, “Neighborhood is everything” when renting an apartment or purchasing a house. Like many, I have experienced living alongside a few bad neighbors in the past. When I lived in the States, for example, one of my neighbors was a colleg
March 12, 2013
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Old-fashioned filibuster brings drones to forefront
The 13-hour filibuster in the U.S. Senate carried on between noon Wednesday and early Thursday morning by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has so many fascinating angles to it, it’s hard to know where to start.There’s the fact that it was one of the few actual standing filibusters these days, and one of the longest in history. Paul openly stated his reasons for blocking a vote and talked as long as he could in service of his mission.There’s the fact that while Paul was wrongly standing in the way of Presi
March 11, 2013
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[Sin-ming Shaw] Hong Kong’s hollow leadership
HONG KONG ― Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying has been dogged by scandal from his first days in office, and his personal integrity is routinely impugned by much of the public. So it is no surprise that his popularity is plummeting.Leung has only himself to blame. He seems incapable of connecting with ordinary Hong Kong citizens, instead coming across as a shifty politician who often dodges direct questions, offers vague answers, and evades responsibility for major failings by apologizing
March 11, 2013
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To understand finance, embrace complexity
A highly unusual collaboration between economists and scientists offers an important insight for those who want to fix the world’s crisis-prone financial system: There’s no simple way to understand a complex network. This month’s issue of the research journal Nature Physics features a handful of papers in which physicists, other natural scientists and leading experts in economics and finance ― including prominent banking regulators and Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz ― put their mi
March 11, 2013
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Obama in Israel: Can the president overcome low expectations?
Later this month, President Obama will visit Israel, a country intended by an act of international law to be the reconstituted Jewish national home. The visit will be highly charged, but at the same time, many Israelis have low expectations for what could come of it.The president’s protracted but unsuccessful attempts to stifle Iran’s nuclear weapons program, his insistence on zealously challenging Israel’s right to a united Jerusalem and his inability to pressure the Palestinian Authority to fu
March 11, 2013
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Global interest fades, but Fukushima problems persist
TOKYO ― Two years have passed since the Fukushima nuclear accident, and international interest in its impact is beginning to wane. But that impact continues to reverberate ― and not only in global public debate about the future of nuclear energy. More than a hundred thousand people remain displaced by the accident, some having lost family, homes, possessions, and even the desire to live.Japan’s nuclear industry, regulators, and government have a responsibility to explain clearly why science and
March 11, 2013
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Do they have no shame?
PARIS ― Is there anything people can possibly do these days to disgust or unnerve themselves? Or is the only barrier to bad behavior massive societal shunning, the likes of which isn’t noticed by those who are too engrossed with themselves to pay attention?I’m asking this because it seemed that everywhere I looked recently, I was bombarded by stunning acts of shamelessness ― to the point where shamelessness arguably WAS the major trend in the news. Let’s look at a few examples.― The “sequester”:
March 10, 2013
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[David Ignatius] A need for rules on drones
WASHINGTON ― Sen. Rand Paul made some dubious warnings about drone strikes on San Francisco cafes in his filibuster last week against the confirmation of John Brennan as CIA director. But his larger argument for clearer limits on drones is absolutely right.Paul’s battle shouldn’t have been with Brennan, who said that as CIA director he wouldn’t have any legal power to authorize domestic drone strikes. Brennan, who has been trying to sort out legal rules for drone warfare, deserved to be confirme
March 10, 2013
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What would Robert F. Kennedy do?
With the sequester now beginning, I find myself thinking about Robert F. Kennedy ― and 46 years ago when I was an intern in his Senate office.The nation was going through a difficult time in 1967. America was deeply split over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Many of our cities were burning. The war was escalating.But RFK was upbeat. He was also busy and intense ― drafting legislation, lining up votes, speaking to the poor, inspiring the young.I was awed by his energy and optimism, and by his o
March 10, 2013
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How does the war against al-Qaida end?
A few days after NBC News uncovered the Obama administration’s legal justifications for killing American citizens, I was sitting in Baltimore-Washington International Airport.The infamous “white paper” lays out in tortured English the lengths to which the president will go in his war against al-Qaida. Americans who renounce their country and pledge themselves to an organization willing to slaughter the innocent do not (and should not) rank among the most sympathetic of characters. When thinking
March 10, 2013
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What comes after Chavez
The death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has the potential to birth a dramatic change in his oil-rich country’s relationship with the United States. But it may take years to materialize, if it ever does.Much will depend on how far the Obama administration is willing to go to encourage Chavez’s successor. Before Chavez’s death Tuesday, Vice President Nicolas Maduro had implied that the United States had somehow given the president cancer.That absurd assertion contrasts with foreign policy an
March 10, 2013
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[Mohamed A. El-Erian] Transatlantic trade’s potential
NEWPORT BEACH ― After instant and seemingly coordinated fanfare in Europe and the United States, the proposal for a European Union-U.S. free-trade area has been generating little media attention. There are three reasons for this, and all three highlight broader constraints on good national economic policymaking and productive cross-border coordination.In his “State of the Union” address in February, U.S. President Barack Obama proposed a “comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partners
March 10, 2013
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Chavez leaves behind a big economic mess
The death of President Hugo Chavez marks the beginning of a perilous and hopeful moment for Venezuela and the Western Hemisphere. There is no denying the impact of the charismatic ex-paratrooper, a plotter and survivor of coups who demolished Venezuela’s political power structure, won three elections with wide support and used the wealth from the world’s largest oil reserves to advance, across the Andes and beyond, his home- brewed ideology of “Bolivarian socialism.” How long that incoherent ide
March 8, 2013