Most Popular
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Do Korean doctors make too much money?
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Korean industries gauge impact of Biden's steep tariffs on China
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Court refuses injunction on medical school expansion
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Why Korean crime stories typically feature nameless, faceless perpetrators
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Is FTC's conglomerate listing a boon or bane for Hybe?
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NewJeans to headline palace show
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Debate on 'no-seniors zones' heats up
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S. Korea, Cambodia forge strategic partnership
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Rare mid-May heavy snow warning issued over mountainous areas of Gangwon
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Is NewJeans headed for a long 'break'?
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Spoiled child Kim playing with fire
The world was shocked by North Korea leader Kim Jong-un.The North’s great heir made a sudden announcement last weekend, warning of a “pre-emptive nuclear strike” on the United States. The next day, he issued a statement declaring that the North-South relations will be entering the state of war.Let’s think about it. If North Korea attacks the U.S. and causes the outbreak of the second Korean War, it will then be a Northeast Asia war. Of course, China, Russia and Japan would not just watch with fo
April 4, 2013
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[Brahma Chellaney] Asia’s scramble for resources
NEW DELHI ― Competition for strategic natural resources ― including water, mineral ores, and fossil fuels ― has always played a significant role in shaping the terms of the international economic and political order. But now that competition has intensified, as it encompasses virtually all of Asia, where growing populations and rapid economic development over the last three decades have generated an insatiable appetite for severely limited supplies of key commodities.Asia is the world’s most res
April 4, 2013
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Strategy needed to rein in officials’ greed
Will the new rules banning government officials from squandering public money on banquets and pretentious activities work to the satisfaction of the general public? Will they be able to shift officials’ attention to the problems that residents urgently need them to solve? The country’s new leaders undoubtedly expected that the answers would be in the affirmative when they endorsed these rules immediately after they took office. They set a good example by not sealing off the roads for their convo
April 4, 2013
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Anti-Muslim unrest puts Myanmar to test
The challenges ahead as Myanmar negotiates the road to reform have always been known to President Thein Sein and the country’s well-wishers. Among these, none causes more discomfort than the instability unleashed by primeval forces of race and religion, which he suggested is the work of enemies out to undermine progress towards openness.The anti-Muslim unrest that roiled central Myanmar the past week called for firm action and his threat of force to quell the violence was justified, even if the
April 4, 2013
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Can pop culture recharge Japan?
Toyota, Toshiba, Sony and Canon ― these are a few of many Japanese brands that became globally famous after Japan established itself as a manufacturer of quality products in the postwar period.It might be too soon to declare an end to the nation’s manufacturing glory, but with South Korea, Taiwan and other economies improving their technology, Japan’s global presence likely will continue to wane if it depends solely on manufacturing. How can the nation revitalise itself?At a recent concert in Ca
April 4, 2013
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[Shashi Tharoor] Economic liberalization of India irreversible
NEW DELHI ― One of the more remarkable (though largely unremarked) developments in recent Indian politics has been the startling shift in the country’s discourse about capitalism. As in many developing countries, “self-reliance” and economic self-sufficiency were India’s national mantras after independence ― and, in India’s case, remained so for more than four decades. Whereas most Westerners axiomatically associate capitalism with freedom, India’s nationalists associated it with slavery. After
April 4, 2013
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Pyongyang’s war of words carries risk
There is a vigorous war of words going on between North Korea on one side and the United States and South Korea on the other, and it shows no signs of letting up. Anyone who likes trash talk should be amply entertained. But we shouldn’t ignore the actual risk all this entails.The North Korean government threatened to hit the U.S. with nuclear armed missiles, and the U.S. had strategic bombers fly practice runs in South Korea. Pyongyang staged a mass rally with citizens urging “Death to the U.S.
April 3, 2013
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[Yoon Young-kwan] Realism on North Korea
BERLIN ― The world’s task in addressing North Korea’s saber rattling is made no easier by the fact that it confronts an impoverished and effectively defeated country. On the contrary, it is in such circumstances that calm foresight is most necessary.The genius of the Habsburg Empire’s Prince Klemens von Metternich in framing a new international order after the Napoleonic Wars was that he did not push a defeated France into a corner. Although Metternich sought to deter any possible French resurge
April 3, 2013
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Outsiders should evaluate students and teachers
The most important determinant of educational quality is teacher quality. Yet, as a recent study of school principals’ permissiveness in teacher evaluations and a cheating scandal in Atlanta show, this performance is difficult to measure. The best way forward is to move the evaluation of teachers outside the schools entirely, with standardized tests administered by an independent agency. This would be supplemented by classroom assessments based on unobtrusive videotaping, also judged by outsider
April 3, 2013
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Xi follows Katy Perry’s tune
Katy Perry may have been banned from China’s music websites, but her “Teenage Dream” now has its Asian counterpart. Newly confirmed in office, President Xi Jinping, has chosen “Chinese Dream” as his signature phrase to describe the direction of his administration. Although it is early, and the phrase could be altered or abandoned, Xi invoked it both on becoming leader of the Communist Party of China and in his final rhetorical salvo as he assumed the presidency. Certainly, as I saw in my recent
April 3, 2013
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[Kim Myong-sik] What little we know about President Park
The approval rating of President Park Geun-hye has dropped to around 40 percent, which is dangerously low compared to the figures recorded by her predecessors in their first few months in office. Obviously, what cuts back on the rate is the sloppy manner with which she has chosen members of her Cabinet and heads of some key agencies. Yet, is that all that has turned so many people away from the new president when it is still too early to test her policies?People are uneasy about the government a
April 3, 2013
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Is Haruhiko Kuroda Japan’s Mario Draghi?
As Haruhiko Kuroda walks into his first policy meeting as Bank of Japan governor, he must be in a Mario Draghi state of mind. Think of Kuroda’s predecessor, Masaaki Shirakawa, as Japan’s equivalent of former European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet. Shirakawa was a respected economist whose doctrinaire ways caused him to stumble when unexpected things happened, such as the financial crisis in 2008. Just as Trichet’s worldview was out of sync with the times (he actually raised interest
April 2, 2013
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[Lee Jae-min] Defining ‘cyber attacks’
Two spats of cyber attacks shut down, though momentarily, websites of major banks and broadcasters of the country, reminding people of similar attacks in 2009 and 2011. The source of the attacks is not clear yet, but they showed that the information infrastructure remains vulnerable to outside attacks. As Korea is one of the most wired countries in the world with almost all sorts of social services provided over the Internet, any disruption of the information network is particularly detrimental
April 2, 2013
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Money-laundering banks still get pass from U.S.
Money laundering by large international banks has reached epidemic proportions, and U.S. authorities are supposedly looking into Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. Governor Jerome Powell, on behalf of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, recently testified to Congress on the issue, and he sounded serious. But international criminals and terrorists needn’t worry. This is window dressing: Complicit bankers have nothing to fear from the U.S. justice system. To be on the safe s
April 2, 2013
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[Naomi Wolf] America’s zombie prison
NEW YORK ― Why add to something that is not supposed to exist?The something in question is the Unites States’ prison in Guantanamo Bay, for which the Pentagon recently requested $49 million in extra funding. Despite Barack Obama’s promise in 2009 ― one of his first as President ― to shut down “Gitmo,” the U.S. evidently has no intention of doing so anytime soon. In fact, the only thing concerning Gitmo that the Obama administration has shut down is the office of the special envoy, Daniel Fried,
April 2, 2013
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[Kim Seong-kon] Somewhere between Constantinople and Istanbul
Today, Istanbul is a city of Muslims. Before the mid-15th century, however, it was a Christian city of the Byzantine Empire called Constantinople. In 1453, Constantinople was conquered by Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Turk Empire, signaling the end of Christianity and Western civilization in the glorious city. Later, the city was renamed Istanbul by the Turks. Ever since, Istanbul has become a curiously fascinating city where the East and the West, Islam and Christianity, and tradition and inn
April 2, 2013
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[David Ignatius] A tool to fill the power gap
TAMPA ― The emblem of the U.S. Special Operations Command pointedly illustrates its mission: It shows the tip of a spear. Now SOCOM is expanding this arsenal to create a global network that can project power even as America’s armies withdraw from the battlefields of the last decade. Adm. William McRaven, the SOCOM commander, has been developing this ambitious new role at his headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base here. McRaven is among the nation’s most celebrated warriors. He planned the operat
April 1, 2013
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The BRICS expose the West’s hypocrisy
Who do they think they are, these upstart economies, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa? That might sum up the feeling in the U.S., Europe and Japan as the BRICS nations consider a new development bank that might challenge the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The move brings to mind Alice Amsden, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist who died last year, and her 2001 book, “The Rise of ‘the Rest.’” The richest nations can stew about this turn of events, as thos
April 1, 2013
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For whom the Cyprus crisis bell tolls?
Ernest Hemingway pieced together the quintessence of the Spanish Civil War in his captivating novel “For whom the bell tolls?” The novel’s protagonist, a young American, gets embroiled in the war while serving in the International Brigade, chronicling senseless inhumanity of man to man as society’s fabric is shredded.One of the most memorable passages of the novel is “For what are we born if not to aid one another?” The novel has many themes, and one is the dependency of society’s individuals on
April 1, 2013
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High court seals the case for gay-marriage inevitability
The substantive case against gay marriage collapsed in the Supreme Court last week. Legally, Supreme Court watchers say, advocates won’t win the sweeping victory they once anticipated as they made arguments last week. The court is likely to overturn a California law that precludes same-sex marriage, on technical grounds. The 17-year-old federal Defense of Marriage Act defining marriage as between a man and woman, and thus denying federal spousal benefits to gays and lesbians, almost certainly wi
April 1, 2013