New jobs are being added as the nation’s economy gains momentum. Last month, the number of people with a job was at 23,336,000, up 469,000 from a year ago. It was the largest monthly gain since July ...t plans. Yet the February gain in job openings should be a vindication for President Lee Myung-bak’s administration, which had been accused of pursuing growth-first and business-friendly policies at ...

... pushing for an irrational populist idea. In an about-face, the ruling party is now moving to adopt the proposal as its policy. Now what will the GNP say about itself? On Wednesday, the ruling party’s task force, working on a housing policy for the underprivileged, said it has decided to put a limit to an increase in rent payments. Its idea is for the government to limit rent increases in residen...

...imply gone. And as individual families in Japan and the world as a whole begin to grieve last week’s horrific earthquake and tsunami, we are also learning firsthand about the vulnerability of nuclear...a to Louisiana. The consequences of a worst-case nuclear mishap are exponentially greater. America’s reaction to the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 stalled U.S. nuclear plant construction for thr...

...hy pursuing such strategies is a bad idea. It happened a year ago when a BP oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico after Obama had been talking up the advantages of expanded offshore drilling, and it’s happening again this week with the nuclear crisis following Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami. A year ago, Obama called the construction of new nuclear plants in the United States a “necessity,” but the political fallout from the Japanese disaster now renders i...

...en 10,000 and 100,000 dead) to satirize his fellow philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Candide, Voltaire’s simple-minded hero, encounters one trauma after another, but each time he accepts the assurance of...e plants’ operators. We may choose to build nuclear power plants, or we may choose a view of today’s lapping waves over worries about tomorrow’s tsunami, but let’s not kid ourselves about who’s respo...

Japan’s domestic nuclear crisis is going global in a hurry. Just ask Christine Lagarde, France’s finance minister, who wants to convene Group of Seven talks on a response to Japan’s earthquake. “I’ve asked for a G7 meeting at the level of finance ministers and central bankers to see how we can purchase their bonds and how to respond on the financial level,” she said. The internationalization of...

... is no doubt South Korea is a close ally, we need to ensure that the agreement does not undermine U.S. security and economic interests by benefiting North Korea. Just six miles north of the demilitar...e pact’s goals in a December 2007 visit to Gaeseong: “The planned ratification of the South Korea-U.S. free-trade agreement will pave the way for the export of products built in Gaeseong to the U.S. m...

...nt royal rites and ceremonies of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910). In 1866, the French invaded Korea’s western island of Ganghwa and set fire to a royal library on the island, Oegyujanggak ― an annex o...two countries’ long dispute and negotiations over the return of Uigwe, which started in the mid-1970s after Park Byeng-sen, a Korean-born librarian, discovered the books at the National Library of Fra...