Most Popular
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Court refuses injunction on medical school expansion
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Is NewJeans headed for a long 'break'?
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Jimin of BTS, actor Song Da-eun suspected to be dating, again
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Police raid popera singer Kim Ho-joong's house over hit-and-run suspicions
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What's next for the government's push in quota hike?
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Trump may like to 'solve' N. Korean nuclear problem if reelected: ex-official
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Woman falls to death from acquaintance's home after exhibiting ‘unexplained' behaviors
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N. Korea slams planned S. Korea-US military drills, warns of 'catastrophic aftermath'
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N. Korea fires short-range ballistic missiles toward East Sea: JCS
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‘Malice should not undermine the system, social order,’ says Hybe's Bang
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Threat of Trans-Pacific Partnership
Many supporters of the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership, or TPP, trade agreement are arguing that its fate rests on President Obama’s bilateral talks with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Japan this week. If Japan and the United States can sort out market access issues for agriculture and automobiles, the wisdom goes, this huge deal ― in effect, a North American Free Trade Agreement on steroids ― can at last be concluded.But this view obscures the many seemingly intractable problems TPP n
April 23, 2014
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Angry Republican foreign policy mess
Republican politicians are at war over the world.Representative Peter King of New York says that Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky encourages “paranoia.” Paul says his critics are distorting his views. Walter Jones, a North Carolina representative seeking his 11th term, is being challenged in a primary that features ads saying he “preaches American decline” and “opposes sanctions on Iran.”It has been at least 20 years since Republicans have argued this angrily about foreign policy. Voters don’t much ca
April 23, 2014
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[Robert J. Fouser] How to improve ties with Japan
Over the past several years, relations between Korea and Japan have steadily deteriorated. President Park Geun-hye and Prime Minister Shinzo Abe have not had a summit and only speak occasionally at international gatherings. Irresponsible media in both countries stir nationalist sentiment through negative, often sensational, reporting. Out of concern for the deteriorating situation, Ogata Sadako, Han Sung-Joo and Ezra F. Vogel wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post (April 12, 2014) that ca
April 22, 2014
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Does ferry disaster expose Korea’s flaws?
The concept of “balle balle,” or “quick, quick!,” is at the very core of Koreans’ view of themselves. After rising from the ashes of war in the 1950s, bouncing back from financial collapse in the late 1990s, and growing into a technology-and-entertainment powerhouse over the last decade, South Korea has turned its ability to get the job done in a bewilderingly short time into a national hallmark.But amid grief, recriminations and breathless news coverage, the investigation into the tragic sinkin
April 22, 2014
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Obama’s good news isn’t getting across
Here‘s a bit of good news for nervous Democrats: President Barack Obama’s health-care law isn‘t going to be the albatross many feared it would be in this year’s congressional elections. Enrollment has soared, and the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the program will cost less than initially projected and that premiums will rise only slightly this year.House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid aren‘t popping the Champagne, however. The economy could clobbe
April 22, 2014
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[Kim Seong-kon] To young students under the sea
Dear young students under the sea, please forgive us for not being able to rescue you from the ill-fated ferry Sewol. As you have found out by now, we adults are so incredibly incompetent and irresponsible that you cannot count on us in times of emergency. When the disaster happened, we were hopelessly sloppy in the rescue mission, press releases and broadcasting. And we were flustered by the wrong information about the passengers. To your disappointment, we were incredibly slow to act as well,
April 22, 2014
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The most important book ever is all wrong
It’s hard to think of another book on economics published in the past several decades that’s been praised as lavishly as Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century.” The adulation tells you something, though not mainly about the book’s qualities. Its defects, in my view, are greater than its strengths ― but the rapturous reception proves that the book, one way or another, meets a need.Martin Wolf of the Financial Times calls it “extraordinarily important.” Paul Krugman, writing in the New Yor
April 22, 2014
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[Thomas Klassen] Danger of ‘hurry, hurry’ culture
The tragic, but apparently preventable, sinking of the Sewol ferry highlights the danger of South Korea’s “hurry, hurry” culture.Korean culture is exceptional in the emphasis it places on speed: finishing projects on time, or rushing a new consumer product onto the market. Korean workers are both envied and feared by international competitors for their willingness to work long hours.The culture of haste starts with children, as primary school children are rushed from school to a variety of daily
April 21, 2014
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China’s water is worse than its air
In recent months, Chinese leaders have pledged drastic steps to clear their nation’s smog-choked air. The bigger question, though, may be how far they’re willing to go to clean up its water.Say one thing for the lung-burning pollution that regularly blankets Beijing and other cities: At least everyone can see the problem. In contrast, a recent benzene spill that poisoned the water supply of Lanzhou ― a city of more than 2 million people ― was terrifyingly odorless and colorless. If anything, pol
April 21, 2014
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Is Moldova next on Putin’s list of targets?
The newly appointed defense minister of Moldova ― the charming but intermittently hapless ex-Soviet Republic stuck between Ukraine and Romania ― is a sturdy-looking ex-prison official named Valeriu Troenco. He seemed, from a slight distance, to be an affable fellow, but he was deeply, dismissively uninterested in answering a question that I asked him after his swearing-in ceremony.The ceremony was held in the presidential offices. While on a trip to Moldova and Ukraine earlier this month, I was
April 21, 2014
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[Park Sang-seek] The inherent instability of the nation-state system
In the post-Cold War era an absolute majority of states are nation-states. In the Cold War period, the Western empires collapsed and reverted to their old nation-state status. Their colonies gained independence also to become nation-states. In the case of the Soviet Union, it consolidated its old empire and even expanded into Eastern Europe during the Cold War period but later disintegrated into 15 separate nation-states. Why do modern states want to become nation-states even if most are not wel
April 21, 2014
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Whether it’s bikes or bytes, teens are teens
If you’re like most middle-class parents, you’ve probably gotten annoyed with your daughter for constantly checking her Instagram feed or with your son for his two-thumbed texting at the dinner table. But before you rage against technology and start unfavorably comparing your children’s lives to your less-wired childhood, ask yourself this: Do you let your 10-year-old roam the neighborhood on her bicycle as long as she’s back by dinner? Are you comfortable, for hours at a time, not knowing your
April 21, 2014
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A moment of truth for India’s women
“The Power of 49”: That’s how Indian activists have started describing the potential influence of women, who make up just under 50 percent of the population, in the country’s ongoing elections. Political parties are courting women for the first time as a bloc, a transformative force that could upend both caste-based voting patterns and the conventional wisdom in New Delhi if they cast their ballots along gender lines.Unfortunately, campaign pledges on women’s issues and advertising blitzes targe
April 20, 2014
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[Thomas Klassen] Foundation of American power
The relative power and influence of the United States is in decline. America commands a smaller role in the world economy than at any time in almost a century, and its sway will decrease in the years to come. America’s military might is constrained as illustrated in Crimea and Syria, not to mention Iran and North Korea. Yet the United States will continue to dominate the global arena for decades, if not centuries, because it has one feature that its competitors lack: incomparable internal cohesi
April 20, 2014
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[Yu Kun-ha] Time for Korea to revamp its ‘pali pali’ culture
What will it take for Korea to upgrade its safety culture? The question is being raised again as the entire nation is gripped with sorrow over the tragic sinking on Wednesday of the ferry Sewol off the southern coast. Among the 476 passengers on board, only 174 have been rescued, with the remainder dead or still missing. But the disaster could have been avoided had the ship’s crew and the company that operated it paid more attention to safety. Investigators have tentatively concluded that the ma
April 20, 2014
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Is there a cure for conservatism?
Thanks to learned scientists, I’ve discovered that I suffer from a mental problem afflicting millions of Americans.It’s not really a disease. It’s more like a peculiarity, one that irritates polite society yet may be corrected with surgery to the frontal lobe. What is this deviancy?Conservatism.For many years now, conservatives have secretly feared the day when science would identify us as aberrant, or to use the vernacular, abby-normal.Sadly, that time has come, in the pages of the liberal-lean
April 20, 2014
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Kansas, the KKK and hate without end
The news that a former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan is suspected of shooting and killing three people near Jewish community centers in Kansas seems at first glance like a disparaged past flaring briefly into the present. Americans like to imagine that the KKK belongs to a long-gone South and anti-Semitism to a distant 20th century. Sadly, this better reflects a naive faith in the nation‘s history of religious tolerance than the realities experienced by many religious minorities. Although the
April 20, 2014
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[Robert Reich] The distributional games
Every year I ask the students in my “Wealth and Poverty” class to play a simple game. I have them split up into pairs and imagine that I’m giving one of them $1,000. They can keep some of the money only on condition they reach a deal with their partner on how it’s to be divided between them.I explain that they’re strangers who will never see one other again, can only make one offer and respond with one acceptance (or decline), and can only communicate by the initial recipient writing on a piece
April 18, 2014
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Cuban Twitter project was a tweet in the dark
PARIS ― First, Cubans would receive fun little text messages about baseball and music. Then, one day ― bam! ― they would learn via cell phone that they’d been living in a dictatorship for over half a century and would realize that it was time to overthrow the regime.Hopefully American taxpayers like the plot of this far-fetched geopolitical revenge fantasy, because they’ve already paid for it. It’s yet another example of technology encroaching on the valuable space once occupied by gray matter.T
April 18, 2014
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[Doyle McManus] Reading between the lines
Reading is such an improbable idea ― a miracle, really. Yet simple squiggles on a page, arranged just so, can convey ideas that change the way we think or introduce to us characters we love for a lifetime. In celebration of reading ― and of this weekend’s Los Angeles Times Festival of Books ― we asked four readers (who also happen to be writers) to celebrate books that mattered in their lives.If you want a friend in Washington, the saying goes, get a dog. But if you’re looking to understand Wash
April 17, 2014