Most Popular
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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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Lee Jong-sup resigns as envoy to Australia
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Official campaigning kicks off for April 10 elections
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Yellow dust engulfs S. Korea, advisory alert issued
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S. Korea to boost support for single-parent families
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Court upholds jail term for man who attempted to murder ex-girlfriend
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Kia EV9 wins world car of year
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Korea misses out on global bond index boost
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[Wang Son-taek] How to respond to the satellite launch of North Korea
The security situation on the Korean Peninsula has fallen into a foggy hole again as North Korea attempted the launch of a military reconnaissance satellite. Though the launch failed, it does not change the assessment that North Korea seriously violated the UN Security Council’s resolutions which ban the North from using ballistic missile technology. As North Korea's satellite launch has consistently deteriorated security anxiety, dragging down the security situation on the Korean Pen
ViewpointsJune 1, 2023
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[Andreas Kluth] Kremlin offers Trump-Putin ticket
The bizarre and unsavory strongman bromance between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump continues. If you’re a Make America Great Again Republican and not having second thoughts by now, something’s wrong with you. The latest head-scratcher and jaw-dropper is a new list of sanctions slapped on American individuals by the Russian president. That’s already weird. Aren’t we in the West the ones imposing sanctions on him for waging a genocidal war of conquest against Ukraine? But
ViewpointsMay 31, 2023
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[Kim Seong-kon] Koreans’ sense and sensibility of colors
Linguists say that the Korean people have an extraordinarily keen sense of colors. For example, Koreans do not simply say something is red, blue, or yellow, or reddish, bluish or yellowish. In fact, the Korean language has numerous, rich adjectives depicting the subtle nuance of different colors. Among others, "bulgu-jukjuk hada," "pureut-pureut hada" and "nori-kiri hada" come to mind, all of which are hard to translate into English, but delicately describe complex
ViewpointsMay 31, 2023
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[Editorial] A blind spot
Alleged employment favoritism which was recently exposed in the National Election Commission shows that an institution, if left unchecked, is likely to decay. NEC Secretary General Park Chan-jin and his deputy, Song Bong-sup, offered to resign Thursday following allegations of preferential treatment in the hiring of their children by the election watchdog. Their resignations came 14 months after the previous Secretary General Kim Se-hwan resigned amid criticisms for poor management of early voti
EditorialMay 31, 2023
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[Parmy Olson] Don't believe your eyes in AI era
A fake photo of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral across Twitter on Monday, and stocks dipped. The incident confirmed what many have said for months: Misinformation is on course to be supercharged as new AI tools for concocting photos get easier to use. Fixing this problem with technology will be an endless game of whack-a-mole. It’s certainly worth trying to track image provenance, as Adobe is doing with its Content Authenticity Initiative. But as the saying goes, a lie can trav
ViewpointsMay 30, 2023
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[Editorial] Step up airline safety
It is always too late to lament safety problems after a fatal accident has already taken place. In particular, midair accidents stemming from lax safety rules could have devastating results. On Friday, a frightening accident involving a local carrier took place, alarming authorities and shocking the public. A passenger suddenly opened a door of an Asiana Airlines plane right before landing at Daegu International Airport -- when the aircraft was about 213 meters above ground. The plane landed wit
EditorialMay 30, 2023
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[Kim Seong-kon] Belonging nowhere and everywhere
Recently, I came across an article in Axios with the headline, “Asian Americans least likely to feel they belong in U.S., study finds.” Quoting from a survey jointly conducted by the Asian American Foundation, the article reported, “Only 22% of Asian Americans said they feel they belong and are accepted in the U.S.” CNN, too, recently reported that many second-generation Korean immigrants to the US are moving to South Korea because “they always felt like outcasts, a
ViewpointsMay 26, 2023
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[Editorial] Perils of fake news
Fast-evolving artificial intelligence offers plenty of powerful tools. As with any device and technology, however, AI can be easily abused in a way that often generates unfathomable results. A striking case in point is a fake photo of an explosion near the US Pentagon that went viral on Monday. The concocted image, likely generated by AI, triggered a brief dip in the US stock market, as some media and individual accounts on Twitter picked up the post and shared it with their followers. The messy
EditorialMay 26, 2023
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[Lee Kyong-hee] South Korea deflects on US-China conflict
Henry Kissinger’s warning of a possible US-China military conflict over Taiwan within the next 5 to 10 years is a sobering prediction for the global community, especially South Korea. Due to its geographic and strategic proximity, it could be quickly embroiled in the fighting. There are plenty of reasons to feel anxious, though publicly the situation is only addressed in measured and oblique terms here. “We are in the classic pre-World War I situation,” says Kissinger, “w
ViewpointsMay 25, 2023
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[Editorial] Revive law enforcement
President Yoon Suk Yeol slammed the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions on Tuesday for its overnight street rally last week. Yoon said its actions infringed on people‘s freedoms and disturbed the public order. He said that his government would not neglect or tolerate any form of illegal action. The ruling People Power Party and the government on Wednesday held a meeting on the issue of establishing the public order. They decided to consider banning rallies from midnight to 6 a.m., strengt
EditorialMay 25, 2023
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[Eric Kim] G-7 2023: Are we repeating history?
I did a recorded interview two weeks ago for the G-7 summit held in Hiroshima. This year’s summit marks the 50th year of G-7, which started in 1973. South Korea was invited as a guest amid the United States pushed for an initiative to decouple with China. The latest G-7 summit was seen as a parallel to the 1980s when Japan started to rise against the US on the global stage. Japan’s rapid rise came after the US transferred semiconductor technology to Japan, laying the foundation for t
ViewpointsMay 25, 2023
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[Garrett Ehinger] We need treaties on biological labs
The conflict in Sudan suddenly drew new levels of alarm when hostile forces in the capital city of Khartoum seized a biological research lab containing lethal viruses such as cholera, measles and polio. It is unclear whether the viruses will be properly contained by the occupying soldiers, or if they will somehow be released and cause new outbreaks. Scenarios like these could have been avoided if there were proper prophylactic measures in place, such as treaties and disincentives. Fighting in Su
ViewpointsMay 24, 2023
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[Editorial] Widening trade deficit
Lawmakers from South Korea's rival parties are in a blame game over the continued decline in exports and snowballing trade deficit amid lingering uncertainty in the global economy that spells trouble for economic policymakers. South Korea’s exports dropped 16.1 percent on-year in the first 20 days of May, extending their negative streak to seven straight months, according to data released by the Korea Customs Service on Monday. The trade deficit for the year so far reached $29.5 billi
EditorialMay 24, 2023
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[Theodore Kim] Can today’s AI truly learn on its own?
One of the boldest, most breathless claims being made about artificial intelligence tools is that they have “emergent properties” -- impressive abilities gained by these programs that they were supposedly never trained to possess. “60 Minutes,” for example, reported credulously that a Google program taught itself to speak Bengali, while the New York Times misleadingly defined “emergent behavior” in AI as language models gaining “unexpected or unintended
ViewpointsMay 23, 2023
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[Noah Feldman] The pro-artist, anti-art ruling
The Supreme Court has sided with individual artists -- but against art itself. In a fascinating copyright decision that transcended ideological lines, the court held that Andy Warhol’s distinctive reworking of a photograph of Prince did not count as fair use, thus requiring the Andy Warhol Foundation to compensate the original photographer. The upshot is that little-guy artists win, because they now have more rights than they had before to claim credit for works re-used by others. But art
ViewpointsMay 23, 2023
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[Editorial] Step for future
South Korean and Japanese leaders’ joint tribute to Korean victims of the 1945 Hiroshima atomic bombing is significant considering the two countries must heal the scars of their past to make it far into the future together. President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida jointly visited a cenotaph honoring the Korean victims at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park on Sunday. It is the first visit by a South Korean president and the first joint visit by leaders of the two count
EditorialMay 23, 2023
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[Sarah Green Carmichael] Is AI the answer to moms’ mental overload?
Earlier this year, I made a dumb financial decision. I bought a car that was beyond our budget. We had just been through an eight-week stretch of demanding work schedules, kitchen renovations and checking-account fraud. Our daughter’s day-care center closed three times, for a COVID outbreak, a bout of norovirus and a water leak. Not exactly tragedies, but when our old car died, my fried brain had no bandwidth for comparison shopping. I walked into a dealership and said I’d look at wh
ViewpointsMay 22, 2023
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[Editorial] Fukushima inspection
A team of South Korean experts embarked on a six-day visit to Japan on Sunday for an on-site inspection amid growing concerns over whether the team will be able to properly check the safety status surrounding Japan’s planned release of radioactive water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the ocean. The inspection comes after South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida held a summit in Seoul earlier this month to thaw frosty bilateral relations. E
EditorialMay 22, 2023
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[Sławomir Sierakowski] The Polish Missile Crisis
On Dec. 16, 2022, a Russian KH-55 missile flew halfway across Poland before landing 12 kilometers outside Bydgoszcz, a city of over 300,000 people that is host to five NATO units and the Joint Forces Training Center. NATO’s largest producer of TNT, Nitro-Chem, is in nearby Belma. The Russian missile, designed to carry a nuclear payload of up to 200 kilotons -- 13 times greater than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima -- was six meters long and weighed 1.7 tons. Fortunately, it appears to have be
ViewpointsMay 22, 2023
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[Jean Guerrero] Shouting down racists isn't effective
We've become accustomed to the weaponization of words. Words are used to divide, dehumanize and incite violence. Conservative leaders spread hateful rhetoric to whip up support for attacks on women, people of color, the LGBTQ+ community and more. Progressives fight back by trying to shout down the purveyors of bigotry. Meanwhile, Americans are losing faith in their capacity to tap into the opposite power of words -- bringing people closer together. Polls show a tendency to avoid political
ViewpointsMay 19, 2023