Most Popular
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[Weekender] Geeks have never been so chic in Korea
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N. Korea says it test-fired tactical ballistic missile with new guidance technology
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NewJeans members submit petitions over court injunction in Hybe-Ador conflict
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[News Focus] Mystery deepens after hundreds of cat deaths in S. Korea
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S. Korea's exports of instant noodles surpass $100m for 1st time in April: data
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[Herald Interview] Byun Yo-han's 'unlikable' character is result of calculated acting
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US military commander in S. Korea during Gwangju uprising dies
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[Photo News] Seoul seeks 'best sleeper'
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US expert says N. Korea might ignore Trump if he returns to White House
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Yoon vows to advance freedom, welfare to uphold spirit of 1980 pro-democracy uprising
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Vaping may be hazardous to your health
“Mind if I vape?” The question may become more common as electronic cigarettes become more popular. The answer, however, remains elusive. Etiquette aside, the health effects of inhaling nicotine vapor (hence the term) are largely unknown. More research is clearly needed, but in the meantime, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has to start regulating e-cigarettes. U.S. consumers will spend $1 billion on battery-powered smokes this year, 10 times more than they did four years ago. Are e-cigaret
Aug. 19, 2013
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U.S. goodies-for-abuse program needs to stop
There’s a grade-school-level international game being played. It’s like the one you played as a kid when you would have a friend punch you as hard as possible in the stomach to see how long you could keep a fake smile plastered on your face. “Oh, THAT didn’t hurt AT ALL! Hit me harder, you wimp!” That, right now, is America ― and it needs to stop.Let’s take two recent beneficiaries of the goodies-for-abuse program: Russia and Pakistan.Russia apparently doesn’t feel that granting asylum to Nation
Aug. 19, 2013
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North Carolina takes perilous lurch to the right
North Carolina is channeling Alabama and South Carolina when it comes to the best economic, social and political model for a U.S. Southern state. For more than half a century, North Carolina has been progressive on education and public investments, and pro-business ― witness the celebrated Research Triangle between Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill and the financial center in Charlotte ― with less racial strife than other Southern states. As Republicans took full control of the state government in
Aug. 19, 2013
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[Park Sang-seek] Two different views of armistice 60 years on
This year the two Koreas have celebrated the 60th anniversary of the armistice of the Korean War for different reasons and different purposes.The countries that made military and nonmilitary contributions to the U.N. Command, particularly South Korea and the U.S., wanted to remind the international community that their participation in the Korean War was the first international effort to make the U.N. a true collective security body and to affirm that the use of force by any individual state or
Aug. 19, 2013
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What Obama misunderstands about Egypt
President Barack Obama last week condemned the Egyptian military’s slaughter of Muslim Brotherhood members and sympathizers, and canceled joint military exercises scheduled for next month. He said that the violence should stop and that “a process of national reconciliation should begin.”What the White House fails to understand is that the Egyptian military has very different ideas about what “reconciliation” should look like. Its goal is to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood, its traditional adversa
Aug. 18, 2013
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[Robert Reich] Why is the U.S. so angry?
Why is the nation more bitterly divided today than it’s been in 80 years? Why is there more anger, vituperation and political polarization now than even during Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts of the 1950s, the tempestuous struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, the divisive Vietnam War, or the Watergate scandal?If anything, you’d think this would be an era of relative calm. The Soviet Union has disappeared and the Cold War is over. The civil rights struggle continues, but at least we n
Aug. 18, 2013
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The hypocritical whaling debate
Japan stands accused at the International Court of Justice of disguising commercial whaling as scientific research, a violation of its international obligations. Japan’s lawyers really don’t have much of a case. Then again, in a larger sense, neither do the country’s accusers. There’s plenty of hypocrisy to go around here. Japan’s whaling isn’t necessary for science, as it claims (and you have to ask if the country’s taste for whale meat is just a coincidence). On the other hand, Japan’s critics
Aug. 18, 2013
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The missing truth in the German campaign
Germany’s election campaign is in full swing now that Chancellor Angela Merkel is back from her hiking vacation in the Alps. She’s way ahead in the polls and likely to join the handful of European Union leaders who’ve won re-election since Europe’s economy tanked. She’s maybe the only one who dares ask voters, “Are you better off now than when I took office?” Amazingly, given the state of the rest of the euro area, the answer is yes: Germans have more jobs than in 2005. The unemployment rate has
Aug. 18, 2013
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Debt of 1 quadrillion yen? Not a problem
Haruhiko Kuroda doesn’t wear a wizard’s hat when he arrives at Bank of Japan headquarters each morning. Once inside, I do wonder if he dons a cloak, waves a magic wand and concocts mysterious potions. Kuroda has done something truly supernatural in his five months as governor of the central bank. The more yen he conjures up to produce inflation, the more he mesmerizes markets. Investors are more bewitched by Kuroda than they are by the number 1,000,000,000,000,000. The 15 zeros now needed to exp
Aug. 18, 2013
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[Shashi Tharoor] Feeding young minds in India
NEW DELHI ― Of the many sad news stories emerging recently from India, the saddest in a long time concerns the deaths of 23 schoolchildren in July in Chhapra, the main town in the impoverished rural Saran district of the state of Bihar. The children were poisoned by their midday meals ― a vital part of a government-run nutrition program in schools ― which apparently were cooked in oil that had been carelessly stored in used pesticide containers. The sheer horror ― parents seeing their kids safel
Aug. 18, 2013
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Egypt’s bloody crackdown threatens civil war
This time, international expressions of concern and calls for restraint will not suffice. The Egyptian military’s brutal clearance of Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo demands the same outrage that would follow if secular protesters were killed by an Islamist government. Responding clearly ― and in the case of the U.S., freezing $1.5 billion in annual aid to Egypt ― isn’t solely a matter of principle. Reports of secularist civilians in Cairo attacking the Muslim Brotherhood protesters, and of
Aug. 16, 2013
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[Rana Mitter] The shadow from Yasukuni
OXFORD, England ― Around this time of year, speculation in Asia always runs high as to whether Japan’s prime minister or other prominent politicians will visit the Yasukuni Shrine. The shrine, which honors more than a thousand indicted war criminals who took part in Japan’s disastrous war in Asia, remains a place of fascination for Japanese rightists, who persist in claiming that Japan’s war in Asia was a war of liberation against Western imperialism.This claim sounds particularly hollow in Chin
Aug. 16, 2013
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Why U.S. workers are getting short-changed
A spate of one-day strikes by fast-food workers has renewed the focus on the abysmal pay for so many at the bottom of the U.S. labor market. Amid all the discussion, a theme keeps cropping up: Labor’s share of national income has plunged while corporate profits have climbed to record highs.The numbers are telling. After peaking in the early 1980s at about 66 percent, U.S. workers have seen their share of the national pie decline to about 58 percent, the lowest since at least the end of World War
Aug. 15, 2013
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[Ma Jian] Bo’s trial not to end the scandal
LONDON ― After a year of unexplained delay, the trial of Bo Xilai, the former Communist Party secretary of Chongqing municipality, is finally about to begin. Bo faces three charges: corruption, bribery, and abuse of power. But his real offense is that he challenged the Chinese Communist Party’s way of doing things. Moreover, his wife’s conviction of the widely publicized murder of British businessman Neil Heywood has severely embarrassed the CCP.When the court finally convicts Bo ― and he is cer
Aug. 15, 2013
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Free flow of information for better quality of life
Countries with Freedom of Information laws “have lower incidence of corruption” and a better quality of life than nations that just recently enforced such a measure or have none at all, according to a study by former Inquirer reporter Edson Tandoc Jr., a Fulbright scholar and doctoral candidate at the Missouri School of Journalism.If reminders of his previous words still fail to prod Philippine President Benigno Aquino III to act more quickly on the long-pending FOI bill, perhaps that piece of e
Aug. 15, 2013
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Is Japan on the road to going militaristic again?
Last Tuesday, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe took part in a ceremony marking the anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima in 1945, an event which, combined with the following atomic bombing of Nagasaki, compelled Japan to surrender nine days later on Aug. 15, ending the Second World War.Also on Tuesday last week, Japan launched its largest warship since the war. The vessel was launched at Yokohama, where Commodore Mathew Perry came with his U.S. Asiatic fleet in 1853 to open Japan to t
Aug. 15, 2013
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[Andy Ho] Will TPP send tobacco regulations up in smoke?
In 2010, 14.3 percent of adults in Singapore were smokers. The goal is to reduce this to under 10 percent by 2020.However, a soon-to-be multilateral free trade agreement threatens our local anti-smoking efforts. This is the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Moving this month in Brunei into its potentially final round of talks, the TPP will establish an FTA encompassing Australia, Brunei, Chile, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, the United States and Vietnam.Drafts of the FT
Aug. 15, 2013
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With so many job openings, why so little hiring?
An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them. To get some sense of how significant this is, consider that if, since June 2010, hiring had risen a third as much as advertised jobs have (rather than only a 10th), and nothing else were different, job creation would be roughly 500
Aug. 14, 2013
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[Graciana del Castillo] Leveling Afghan playing field
NEW YORK ― Afghanistan’s security and political situation remains plagued by uncertainty, stemming from the withdrawal of United States and NATO combat troops, the upcoming presidential election, and the stalled peace negotiations with the Taliban. Recognizing that continued economic insecurity will exacerbate this perilous situation, the government has announced a new package of economic incentives aimed at attracting foreign direct investment. The package includes the provision of land to indu
Aug. 14, 2013
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Jeff Bezos could be good for journalism
I used to live in Washington, D.C., and I worked at The Washington Post. Now I live near Seattle and work at The Seattle Times in a building just next door to Amazon.com’s sprawling complex.Those facts add up to just a few degrees of separation for the journalists and non-journalist friends curious about my thoughts about Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Post.Sorry, but I have no insights beyond speculation. Bezos, a private guy anyway, is not walking around the South Lake Unio
Aug. 13, 2013