Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon has been fighting an uphill battle against the city council’s decision in favor of free lunches for all schoolchildren. The mayor, affiliated with the ruling Grand National Party, believes that it is a populist policy to provide lunch free of charge at primary schools regardless of the parents’ income levels. He demands free lunch be limited to those whose parents cannot af...

On Thursday, the European Parliament approved a free trade agreement with Korea. Now the Korean legislature is urged to speed up the process of ratifying the deal, which EU Ambassador to Korea Tomasz Kozlowski says will “more than double EU-Korea trade in the next 20 years as compared with a scenario without the FTA.” The FTA is a win-win deal to both sides, not a zero-sum game. As such, there i...

When the Ministry of Strategy and Finance submitted a bill on Islamic bonds to the National Assembly in September 2009, its main motivation was to secure new sources of foreign capital that Korea could tap into when liquidity dries up due to turmoil in the global financial system ― such as the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008. But the bill gained added importance following a Korean consortium...

The government has come up with a set of measures aimed at making Korea a fairer and more transparent society. The action plans followed up on President Lee Myung-bak’s vision of a fair society unveiled in his Liberation Day speech on Aug. 15 last year. On Thursday, officials from related ministries briefed Lee on their plans to implement the package. At the meeting, Lee demonstrated his commitm...

Belatedly, the National Assembly is opening an extraordinary session on Friday. With so many bills and agenda items sitting on its calendar, the legislature will have to close the session on March 2 only to open another 10-day session the next day, as agreed by rival parties. The National Assembly has remained closed since the ruling Grand National Party rammed the administration’s 2011 budget r...

North Korea is a country of so many contradictions that it defies ordinary people’s attempt to understand it. Even outside foreign policy experts closely watching North Korea often feel baffled by presumably unexplainable events happening in the communist state. In short, it is a perpetual enigma to the outside world. The latest series of events concerning North Korea is a case in point. North K...

Since July last year, a reform panel of the ruling Grand National Party has been working on a plan to overhaul the way the party nominates candidates for parliamentary elections. Last month, the panel disclosed a draft scheme based on a U.S.-style primary system that picks candidates through votes by party members and citizens. The open primary system, in fact, had been used by the GNP and other...

According to Statistics Korea, aggregate household spending on private education dropped for the first time in 2010. Data shows that Korean parents spent a total of 20.9 trillion won last year on educating their children at private institutions, down 3.5 percent from a year ago. What does this imply? Does it mean the incumbent government’s war against private education has started to pay off? Th...

North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il turns 70 today. He officially becomes 69 but chronologists know that he celebrated his 40th birthday twice in 1981 and 1982 as Pyongyang’s legend writers for the Kim family were asked to cut a year from his real age to create a precise 30-year age difference from his father (born 1912) upon his designation as the heir to the power. Kim enters his 70s at a sensitive...

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi is expected to visit Seoul next week, three months after he canceled a visit here last November. Three days before Yang’s scheduled arrival here on Nov. 26, North Korea made an artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island in one of the worst provocations since the Korean War, killing two Marines and two civilians and destroying many homes in the fishing and farming c...

It is annoying that the new head of the Korea Meteorological Administration is involved in a controversy over his criminal record for a drunken hit-and-run incident. Opposition members of the National Assembly’s Environment-Employment Committee demanded that Cho Suk-joon step down from his new office and blamed President Lee Myung-bak for making yet another flawed appointment to a high office. C...

The heavy snowfall over the eastern areas of Gangwon Province poses a serious hazard to the people’s lives in the region but it can be a blessing to PyeongChang, which is making a bid to host the Winter Olympics for the third time. A 14-member delegation from the International Olympic Committee just arrived to conduct its onsite inspection of PyeongChang and nearby venues until Friday. They came ...

Egypt stands at a crossroads following the resignation on Friday of President Hosni Mubarak, who ruled the Arab world’s most populous country for the past 30 years with an iron fist. Pro-democracy activists who had boldly protested at Tahrir Square in Cairo since Jan. 25 pulled off a revolution by forcing the dictator to step down. But the key to the nation’s future is not in their hands. It is h...

Global food prices are going through the roof, threatening to push the world into a war over food. Earlier this month, the U.N. Food and Agricultural Organization said world food prices hit their highest level ever recorded in January and were set to keep rising in the months to come. It is a strong signal that a severe global food crisis is imminent or under way. According to the FAO, its food ...

For urban tenant families, the difficulty of finding a place to live at an affordable rent does not show any sign of easing. On the contrary, it is worsening as the early spring moving season is approaching. For many families with modest income, it will not be like spring at all when it has already come, as the old Chinese saying goes. The rise in rent is so steep that few hesitate to call it a ...