Most Popular
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Opposition-led Assembly unilaterally passes bill to probe Marine's death
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Golden chance to liquidate babies’ gold rings?
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Inflation eases in April, continues bumpy ride
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Seoul to more than double military drones by 2026 to counter NK threats
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Russia sent more than 165,000 barrels of refined petroleum to N. Korea in March: White House
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Seoul alerts overseas missions to NK terror threats
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Over 60% of S. Koreans support W100m childbirth incentive: survey
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Key suspects grilled over alleged abuse of power in Marine death inquiry
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‘Inside Out 2’ adds four new emotions, explores teenage life
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Questions raised over fair promotion of RM, NewJeans
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[David Ignatius] The world according to Murdoch
WASHINGTON ― Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is a company with a chip on its shoulder. His defy-the-establishment sensibility has built a print and television empire, to the despair of more traditional (and, Murdoch would say, elitist) rivals. But the phone-hacking scandal that now envelops one of Murdoch’s British publications shows how corrosive this style of anything-goes journalism can be. It’s be
July 17, 2011
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TSA can be smarter about passenger patdowns
When you read last week that terrorists have discussed surgically implanting explosives in passengers so they could blow up airliners, did you feel a little less aggrieved about the TSA agents who supposedly patted down a 95-year-old woman in a wheelchair?That patdown was a late-June outrage du jour about the Transportation Security Administration. The story: The elderly woman was patted down and,
July 17, 2011
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[Shashi Tharoor] Is Kabul ready to stand alone?
NEW DELHI ― U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement of the start of American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, and his administration’s increasing emphasis on reconciliation with the Taliban, have been studied attentively in one capital that has a large stake in the outcome ― New Delhi.India has no troops in Afghanistan, but it has invested roughly $1.5 billion to help reconstruct the country
July 17, 2011
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[Peter Goldmark] Debt threats plague the United States and Europe
The months ahead in 2011 will constitute a summer to remember for a long, long time.The world’s two largest economies ― the United States and Europe ― are drifting toward brutal days of reckoning. Both economies face severe financial and economic challenges.Failure by either or both would send severe shocks through the already limping global economy. In the United States, a fiercely aroused but in
July 17, 2011
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[Daniel Akst] Obama rewards GOP stonewalling
Everyone knows you can train a dog by rewarding the behavior you want Rover to repeat. But Barack Obama has always been ambitious, so he trains Republicans. The behavior he rewards is intransigence. Every time congressional Republicans adopt an inflexible position ― such as their current no-tax-hikes stance in negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling ― the president rewards them with a t
July 17, 2011
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[Tim Rutten] News Corp. scandal shows decline of media
The only sort of power a news organization can wield safely is the power to persuade.Every other sort ― no matter how high-minded or expedient the reason for taking it up ― is a kind of slow poison that twists the souls of the journalists involved and, ultimately, makes their enterprise dangerously self-interested and unaccountable. That’s the fundamental lesson to be taken from the spectacle of t
July 17, 2011
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[Jonathan Schell] The fall of the house of Murdoch
NEW YORK ― During the four decades since the Watergate affair engulfed U.S. President Richard Nixon, politicians have repeatedly ignored the scandal’s main lesson: the cover-up is worse than the crime. Like Nixon, they have paid a higher price for concealing their misdeeds than they would have for the misdeeds alone.Now, for once, comes a scandal that breaks that rule: the United Kingdom’s phone-h
July 15, 2011
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[Editorial] International assistance vital for South Sudan
A newly independent country in North Africa has got off to an uncertain start. The country needs support from the international community until it can move ahead on its own.South Sudan, officially the Republic of South Sudan, became the 54th independent nation on the African continent when it officially separated from Sudan on July 9.Over the past half-century, the Sudanese people suffered from ci
July 15, 2011
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[Martin Khor] Rich economies caught in crisis
There was more bad news about the global economy last week. It looks as if the major developed economies are facing worsening problems that will not go away.This does not augur well for the developing world, as it is still dependent on the richer economies.An economic slowdown in the United States was indicated by last week’s data of a rise in unemployment to 9.2 percent and only 18,000 new non-fa
July 15, 2011
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[Editorial] Social networks for Taiwan’s presidential poll
The introduction of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks and online video-streaming sites has revolutionized the concept of “breaking news” and information distribution.Using the highly visual and instantaneous new media can allow something to spread faster than the proverbial wildfire, creating a borderless, 24-hour wellspring of data that simultaneously attracts millions of eyeballs acro
July 15, 2011
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[Editorial] Cruel news for world
For the print media struggling to survive in a world that seems to be inexorably bent on embracing the electronic media, the news that News of the World, London’s biggest selling weekend tabloid, was closing was, indeed, cruel, cruel news. If only for the paper’s longevity, the last issue last Sunday of the 168-year-old News of the World was headline news many times over. The News was an instituti
July 15, 2011
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[Editorial] China, U.S. need more military exchanges
It is noteworthy that over the years whenever there has been a rift in Sino-U.S. ties, bilateral military relations have always been the first to be affected and that even when bilateral relations are warming, military-to-military exchanges are usually the last to thaw. With the unfolding of a series of reciprocal visits and dialogues between the two militaries this year, including former U.S. Sec
July 15, 2011
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[Gordon Brown] Why Europe slept during crisis
LONDON ― When the history of the 21st century is written, people will rightly ask why it was that Europe was found wanting during its most intractable economic crisis.They will ask why Europe slept as an undercapitalized banking system floundered, unemployment remained unacceptably high, and the continent’s growth and competitiveness plummeted.Worse still, if a reconstruction plan does not come so
July 14, 2011
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[Allan Luks] Charities can act as the United States’ conscience
Among the many proposals to raise taxes and cut and reallocate government spending to regain our country’s economic health, one of the most sensitive is decreasing the tax deductibility of charitable contributions.The independent Congressional Budget Office recently reviewed 11 options for revising the income tax treatment of charitable giving, and it grouped them into four categories. All establi
July 14, 2011
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[Francois Godement] China bargain-hunting in Europe
PARIS ― In Shakespeare’s plays, comedy often meets tragedy. Perhaps Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao reflected on this as he watched a performance of Hamlet in Stratford-upon-Avon during his recent European tour. And, apropos the play, he may have been thinking: “To buy or not to buy?” In Bulgaria last March, one of his ministers quipped that “there will always be someone pointing fingers at us, whether
July 14, 2011
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[Adam Skaggs and Maria da Silva] America’s judiciary: Courting disaster
Denouncing a proposal to cut $150 million out of a courts budget that has already absorbed a $200 million reduction, California’s chief justice, Tani Cantil-Sakauye, recently warned that the “devastating and crippling” cuts would “threaten access to justice for all.”California’s not alone. Last month, 350 court employees in New York were laid off to offset $170 million in cuts to the state judicia
July 14, 2011
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[Steffen Hertog] The perils of economic populism in the Mideast
The first signs of a post-revolutionary hangover are everywhere in the Arab world. Where unity of purpose once defined the reform movements in Egypt and Tunisia, now particular interests are coming to the fore. Forces for change are fracturing. Conflicts revolve not just around the constitutional framework of the transition away from dictatorship or the place of Islam in public life, but increasin
July 14, 2011
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[Joseph E. Stiglitz] Ideological crisis of capitalism
NEW YORK ― Just a few years ago, a powerful ideology ― the belief in free and unfettered markets ― brought the world to the brink of ruin. Even in its hey-day, from the early 1980s until 2007, American-style deregulated capitalism brought greater material well-being only to the very richest in the richest country of the world. Indeed, over the course of this ideology’s 30-year ascendance, most Ame
July 13, 2011
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[By Jonathan Alter] Sputnik dreams lost to space shuttle realities
It’s hard to believe that less than six months ago President Barack Obama was talking about a “Sputnik moment.” In his State of the Union address he proposed huge investments in infrastructure, innovation and education to help us “win the future.” The president still wants those investments, but nowadays he means something different when he talks about the need to “do something big.” At his news c
July 13, 2011
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[Linda Yueh] Seeing double at central banks
The current issue is that the monetary aggregate (M4) measure of lending to the private sector is at its lowest level in a decade, while inflation is more than double the BOE’s target.OXFORD ― Central banks are now targeting liquidity, not just inflation. The credit boom of the past decade highlighted the inadequacy of focusing only on prices, and underscored the need for the monetary authority of
July 13, 2011