Most Popular
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Hyundai Motor eyes 80,000 jobs, W68tr investment at home by 2026
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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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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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Court upholds jail term for man who attempted to murder ex-girlfriend
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[Herald Interview] Son Suk-ku chooses to be swayed by others in navigating life
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Name-calling on Internet is a serious business
More than 5 billion additional people will connect to the Internet in the next 20 years, and most of the newcomers will not speak English. This next generation will use the Internet in ways we cannot imagine, and its innovations will change the world. But if the debate in Washington over the creation of new domain names goes the wrong way, Internet policy won’t help the free flow of speech online. The U.S. can help by having the courage to stay the course. At issue is the Internet’s crabbed nami
Jan. 10, 2012
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[Kim Seong-kon] Looking again at ‘The Heartless’
Yi Kwang-su is undisputedly known as the father of modern Korean literature. Before Yi, a new mode of Korean literature called New Fiction (sinsoseol) briefly emerged in the early 20th century and yet remained largely sentimental and old-fashioned in style, not completely free from the classical theme of “promoting virtue and reprising vice.” It was Yi Kwang-su who boldly adopted colloquial expressions and a modern narrative technique suitable for depicting and wrestling with the complex issues
Jan. 10, 2012
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[Shimon Peres] A future without precedent
JERUSALEM ― In my nearly nine decades of life, I cannot recall a time in which the past was so irrelevant to policymaking. All of today’s significant developments went unpredicted by anyone. Experts studied the past, but, constrained by old paradigms, they could not discern the future.Today’s dynamic complexity, in which a science-based, fast-changing global economy makes so many more phenomena interdependent, prevents us from foreseeing the future through linear extrapolations of the past. The
Jan. 9, 2012
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[Shlomo Ben Ami] U.S. faces time of reckoning after decade of war
MADRID ― The folding of the American flag in Iraq amid a collapse of public security and a severe crisis in the country’s fragile political order seals a tragic chapter in the history of the United States. It marked the denouement of one of the clearest cases ever of the imperial overreach that former U.S. Senator William Fulbright called the “arrogance of power.”Violently torn by religious and ethnic rivalries, Iraq is in no condition to play its part in America’s vision of an Arab wall of cont
Jan. 9, 2012
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Rise of Salafis poses challenge to Egypt’s future
CAIRO ― “We want democracy, but one constrained by God’s laws. Ruling without God’s laws is infidelity,” Yasser Burhami, the second leading figure in the Salafi Call Society (SCS) and its most charismatic leader, recently said. The unexpected rise of the Salafis in Egypt’s parliamentary election has fueled concern that the most populous Sunni Arab country could be on its way to becoming a fundamentalist theocracy akin to Shia Iran. Known for its social ultra-conservatism, literal and strict inte
Jan. 9, 2012
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Radical Muslim power grabs in Arab nations huge setback for U.S.
WASHINGTON ― At its best, U.S. policy toward the Middle East consists of a deft combination of short-term pragmatism and long-term idealism.In the short term, Washington works to protect Israel and other U.S. allies, combat terrorism, rebuff Iran’s hegemonic ambitions, and support regional stability, all of which ensures the continued flow of oil to power Western economies.In the long run, Washington promotes the advance of freedom and democracy in the region and elsewhere to expand the circle o
Jan. 9, 2012
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Is it time to ban cosmetic surgery?
The faulty breast implants made by the French company Poly Implants Protheses, or PIP, have grabbed headlines around the world in recent weeks, and it’s no wonder. The prostheses are more prone to rupture than other models, and they contain an industrial grade of silicone never intended for use in a medical device. The scandal is also global in scope. Sold in 65 countries, the implants were re-branded by a Dutch company registered in Cyprus, offered on credit in Venezuela and smuggled into Boliv
Jan. 8, 2012
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[David Ignatius] Eastward foreign-policy pivot in U.S.
WASHINGTON ― When you ask Obama administration officials to explain their foreign policy agenda for 2012, they point first to the defense budget. That’s where they want to make a “pivot” in U.S. strategy ― away from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and toward the 21st-century priority of China and the Pacific. To underline the importance of this rebalancing, President Obama went to the Pentagon Thursday for the budget announcement. He began by declaring victory in what used to be known as “the l
Jan. 8, 2012
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Improving Korea-Japan relations is possible: look at the Germany-Poland example
During the last two decades, relations between Japan and the Republic of Korea starkly improved in the economic and cultural dimensions while political cooperation still shows a Cold War scheme. For a real normalization process to start, the two countries should follow the example set by two former foes turned friends: Germany and Poland.Look at the dynamics of bilateral trade and normalization that Tokyo and Seoul seem to have achieved. In 2010 total volume of trade was more than $92 billion ―
Jan. 8, 2012
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Police leave victims in the dark
As I look over my 2011, I not only appreciate the good experiences of the year, but revisit the difficulties, foremost of which was a cyber crime I suffered while living in Korea. As a foreigner, dealing with law enforcement was more complex, and in my case, as damaging as suffering the cyber attack.Months have passed and time has given me perspective so that I can look at the experience objectively and offer suggestions to help others. As I’d lived in Korea for many years, I had a number of bil
Jan. 8, 2012
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Internet ill-equipped to discuss the God particle
A couple of weeks ago, scientists at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, announced that they’d made “significant progress” in the search for a subatomic particle called the Higgs boson ― the so-called God particle.Two teams of physicists conducting separate analyses of data collected by the Hadron supercollider outside of Geneva, Switzerland, noticed a similar rise in indication of particle decay in approximately the same range ― 125 gigaelectronvolts.I have no idea how much a
Jan. 8, 2012
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[Javier Solana] Peril or promise in North Korea?
MADRID ― Two days after Kim Jong-il, North Korea’s leader, died in a train in his country, South Korean authorities still knew nothing about it. Meanwhile, American officials seemed at a loss, with the State Department at first merely acknowledging that press reports had mentioned his death.The South Korean and U.S. intelligence services’ inability to pick up any sign of what had happened attests to the North Korean regime’s opaque character, but also to their own deficiencies. American planes a
Jan. 8, 2012
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The Roma is Europe’s squandered minority
BUDAPEST ― Today, millions of Europeans are afraid and frustrated as they face unemployment, loss of savings and pensions, radically reduced social benefits, and other economic hardships. Their fears are warranted, because the current financial crisis is undermining the very union that was established to heal Europe’s wounds at the end of World War II. But, in the midst of the general suffering, one group ― the Roma ― has been ignored. Europe’s largest and most disadvantaged ethnic minority, wit
Jan. 6, 2012
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[David Ignatius] History and imperiled middle class
WASHINGTON ― It’s a sign of these unsettled times that the analyst who famously announced “the end of history” in 1989, when the Soviet empire was crumbling and liberal, free-market democracy seemed inevitable, has just published a new essay with the provocative title “The Future of History.” Francis Fukuyama’s article appears in the January edition of the journal Foreign Affairs. It offers a good introduction to what may be the biggest political issue of 2012 ― the decline of the middle class i
Jan. 6, 2012
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Collecting golden eggs from migrant labor
The persistent perception one gets from all the reports about our migrant labor is that we consistently welcome the billions in remittances from their blood, sweat and tears. Yet policies since the 1980s also display a superficial sense of urgency in ensuring the security and welfare of millions of our men and women working far from home, many of them in high-risk situations.The Malaysian news agency Bernama reported recently that Indonesian workers sent home $6.1 billion last year despite unres
Jan. 6, 2012
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Tohoku reconstruction vital to nation as a whole
Getting post-disaster reconstruction efforts onto a steady track is a great task for Japan this year. We should consider the new year as “the first year of full-scale reconstruction” from the Great East Japan Earthquake.The March 11 quake and tsunami left many people bereft of their loved ones and deprived of their longtime homes, while also severing communities’ life-sustaining ties of mutual support.The number of people who were forced to evacuate, and saw out the old year while living in temp
Jan. 6, 2012
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[Shashi Tharoor] Anti-corruption contest in India
NEW DELHI ― India ended 2011 amid political chaos, as the much-awaited “Lokpal Bill,” aimed at creating a strong, independent anti-corruption agency, collapsed amid a welter of recrimination in the parliament’s upper house, after having passed the lower house two days earlier. The episode, which leaves the bill in suspended animation until its possible revival at the next session, raises fundamental issues for Indian politics which will need to be addressed in the New Year.The need for the bill
Jan. 6, 2012
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Did psychopaths take over Wall Street asylum?
It took a relatively obscure former British academic to propagate a theory of the financial crisis that would confirm what many people suspected all along: The “corporate psychopaths” at the helm of our financial institutions are to blame. Clive R. Boddy, most recently a professor at the Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, says psychopaths are the 1 percent of “people who, perhaps due to physical factors to do with abnormal brain connectivity and chemistry” lack a “conscie
Jan. 5, 2012
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Foreign Koreanness captured in the movies
With the recent release of the first two trailers for “Papa,” it looks like mainstream Korean cinema will continue to wrestle with the issue of immigration and multiculturalism into the new year. As new as this theme may seem for Korean film, “Papa” actually follows in the footsteps of last year’s very successful “Wandeuki” (English title: “Punch”) and 2010’s almost equally successful “Banga Banga” (English title: “He’s on Duty”), as well as a string of independent films that addressed the same
Jan. 5, 2012
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Malcolm Gladwell test has Japan turning Chinese
If you want to silence a room filled with Japanese politicians, suggest they should learn from China. The conventional wisdom favors the flip side of this dynamic: China should be studying Japan’s playbook. Japan, after all, is an example of both what China needs to do (create a vibrant domestic economy and high living standards) and what it mustn’t (slide into bad-loan crises and deflation). Yet I have one word for Japanese policy makers who dismiss the idea they should heed China’s example: Sh
Jan. 5, 2012