Most Popular
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Seoul blanketed by heaviest Nov. snow, with more expected
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NewJeans to terminate contract with Ador
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NewJeans terminates contract with Ador, embarks on new journey
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Seoul snowfall now third heaviest on record
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Samsung shakes up management, commits to reviving chip business
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Korean Air gets European nod to become Northeast Asia’s largest airline
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Hybe consolidates chairman Bang Si-hyuk’s regime with leadership changes
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Heavy snow of up to 40 cm blankets Seoul for 2nd day
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How $70 funeral wreaths became symbol of protest in S. Korea
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Chaos unfolds as rare November snowstorm grips Korea for 2nd day
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[Robert Muggah, Juan Carlos Garzon] Ways to stem the violence in Latin America
The sense of unease on many Latin American city streets is palpable. Fear and uncertainty affect people’s day-to-day decisions — whether to take public transport, where to buy groceries, when to go out at night. Pervasive insecurity also influences long-term plans — what neighborhood to move to, whether to save or spend and, finally, whether to emigrate or stay put.Latin Americans have good reason to feel unsafe. Mexico’s soaring homicide rates have reached 20-year highs. The Central American ci
Aug. 27, 2017
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[Jesse Walker] Is US headed for second civil war?
A cliche is haunting America — the cliche of a second civil war.“America is currently fighting its second civil war,” conservative columnist Dennis Prager declared in January. “Is a Second Civil War in the Making?” the left-wing website Alternet asked a few months later. In March, Foreign Policy polled various national security figures on the likelihood of a new civil war; the panel put the chances at about 30 percent. Now the New Yorker has posed the same question to several Civil War historian
Aug. 25, 2017
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[Adam Minter] China takes on Hollywood with local flavor
In 2007, an up-and-coming Chinese leader by the name of Xi Jinping was having dinner with the US ambassador. As the evening wound down, the ambassador asked Xi if he’d seen any good movies lately. Xi said he had a DVD of “Flags of Our Fathers” that he meant to watch. He added that he liked Hollywood’s World War II films because they’re “grand and truthful” in their moral outlook. By contrast, he thought Chinese films were too concerned with “talking about bad things in imperial palaces.”If that’
Aug. 25, 2017
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[Richard L. Hasen] Speech in America is fast, cheap and out of control
The internet and social media did not create white supremacist movements in the United States, such as the hate groups that rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, earlier this month to deadly results. Nor did the internet create Donald Trump, who defended the Nazi protesters as “very fine people.” Trump was a demagogue long before he became @realDonaldTrump on Twitter. And there was plenty of “fake news” before there was Facebook.The rise of what we might call “cheap speech” has, however, fundame
Aug. 24, 2017
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[David Ignatius] Trump doesn’t want the stain of defeat in Afghanistan
Will President Trump’s new Afghanistan strategy alter the dynamics of America’s longest and most frustrating war? Do commanders really have any better chance of succeeding now than when this conflict began 16 years ago?I put those questions by phone Tuesday to Gen. John “Mick” Nicholson Jr., who for more than 18 months has commanded US forces in Kabul. This is his fourth tour in Afghanistan and his sixth year of service there. He probably knows as much about this difficult and costly war as any
Aug. 24, 2017
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[Daniel Moss] Aging Japan wants automation, not immigration
Japan’s next boom may be at hand, driven by the very thing that is supposed to be bad for its economy. Japan’s aging and shrinking population has been partly blamed for the on-again, off-again nature of growth and deflation the past three decades. Lately, it’s been driving a different and just as powerful idea: In the absence of large-scale immigration, the only viable solution for many domestic industries is to plow money into robots and information technology more generally.Humans will still b
Aug. 24, 2017
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[Noah Smith] Higher minimum wages will give high tech a boost
David Neumark, an economist at the University of California-Irvine, could safely be called a minimum-wage skeptic. Neumark has written a number of papers on the topic, all of which have found that minimum wages reduce employment by substantial amounts. This makes him a bit of an outlier in terms of the overall research consensus, which tends to find modest or no employment effects.But unlike many researchers, who maintain a laser-like focus on the question of whether minimum wage cuts jobs in th
Aug. 24, 2017
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[Brad Taylor] How to beat North Korea at nuclear blackmail
“Strategic patience” is out as the US approach to North Korea, and “strategic accountability” is the new term of art. That’s according to an op-ed article by Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. “The object of our peaceful pressure campaign,” they write, “is the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.”While I heartedly approve of finally providing clarity beyond President Donald Trump’s bombastic statements, we should be realistic. I understand the reasons fo
Aug. 23, 2017
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[Ana Palacio] Guardian of liberal world order
The global financial crisis, which began 10 years ago this month, showed that the Western-led rules-based international order’s long-term survival is not inevitable. It is often assumed that if and when the United States loses its place as the global hegemon in that system, China will be the country to lead the world. But what would a Chinese-led order look like?Events this summer hinted at an answer. In June, a subsidiary of Spanish oil company Repsol began drilling an offshore well within Viet
Aug. 23, 2017
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[San Diego Union-Tribune] Why Iran nuclear deal is still historic challenge for Trump
In July 2015, The San Diego Union-Tribune Editorial Board called the agreement that the United States, Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the European Union had just reached with Iran a “historic gamble.” In exchange for reduced economic sanctions and the return of up to $150 billion in seized assets, Tehran agreed to sharp limits on its uranium enrichment program -- which could have been used to make nuclear weapons -- and to regular inspections of its nuclear facilities.We lauded the
Aug. 23, 2017
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[Doyle McManus] Is there anyone left willing to defend Trump?
When a van plowed into pedestrians in Barcelona last week, President Trump didn’t wait for investigators to determine who the attackers were. Within minutes of the first reports, he tweeted: “The United States condemns the terror attack in Barcelona, Spain, and will do whatever is necessary to help.”But when a car rammed into a crowd in Charlottesville, Virginia, five days earlier, Trump decried violence “on many sides” and explained that he needed to wait for the facts to come in. Later, under
Aug. 23, 2017
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[Bloomberg] The US Navy’s deadly collision course
The circumstances of the crash of the USS John S. McCain near Singapore, which killed at least one US sailor and has left nine missing, remain unclear pending a Navy investigation. The bigger picture, however, is already in focus: Four major accidents this year involving ships of the 7th Fleet highlight a systemic problem that imperils American dominance on the high seas.At any given time, about 100 of the Navy’s roughly 275 ships are deployed. Yet the fleet is half the size it was 30 years ago,
Aug. 23, 2017
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[Lee Joo-hee] Moon needs courage to be hated
It is literally impossible to please everyone, yet we constantly make the mistake of believing one should, or can.Imagine trying to please 51,744,948 people. That is what President Moon Jae-in set out to do, vowing to become “everyone’s president” as he was sworn in as the 19th leader of the fastidious crowd three months ago. With the dust of political chaos barely settling down, Moon’s inauguration promise seemed an invitation to criticism. It was comparative to, for instance, former US Preside
Aug. 23, 2017
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Clean energy scores a small victory
Government scientists worried that their long-in-the-works assessment of climate change would be suppressed. The concern hardly rates as overwrought. Scott Pruitt, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, says he does not believe that carbon dioxide is a primary contributor to global warming. What matters is that a draft of the climate report landed in the New York Times, the public learning that scientists from 13 federal agencies have concluded that Americans already are seeing the eff
Aug. 23, 2017
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[The San Diego Union-Tribune ] NAFTA negotiations a test for Trump’s troubled presidency
President Donald Trump faced such strong criticism for his unforgettably and unforgivably poor response to the horrific violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, that not even the firing of his chief strategist Steve Bannon on Friday will be enough for millions of Americans to turn the page.“We’re going to win so much you may even get tired of winning,” Trump said 15 months ago.Just plain tired, maybe.Still, many millions of Americans are steadfast in their support for the president, either because
Aug. 22, 2017
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[Kim Seong-kon] Declaration of independence from Confucianism
Recently, I read the controversial book “Confucius Must Die for This Nation to Live” by Professor Kim Kyung-il. The book is a de-facto declaration of independence from Confucianism, which has been the predominant and prevalent philosophy in Korean society for the past 600 years. In the book, the author strongly asserts that all social evils and chronic problems in Korean society stem from Confucianism. According to Kim, both China and Japan abandoned Confucianism a long time ago, but Korea unwis
Aug. 22, 2017
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[Caroline Freund] US needs China trade deals, not ‘remedies’
China is the largest market for General Motors, but there is no GM China. Instead, there is SAIC-GM, a joint venture between China’s largest state-owned auto company and GM.All auto companies operating in China have a similar partner, such as SAIC-Volkswagen, GAC-Toyota and Changan-Ford. And the partners are typically state-owned companies, and their names come first.Doing business in China requires such joint ventures in several other industries as well, including finance and telecommunications
Aug. 22, 2017
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[John Yoo] The new weapons we need
With threats, bribes, diplomacy and sanctions, American presidents of both parties have sought for 25 years to try to halt, or at least slow, North Korea’s quest for a nuclear arsenal -- to no avail.Though the brinksmanship of the last few weeks has subsided, President Donald Trump still faces the prospect of a madman -- Kim Jong-un -- in control of a nuclear arsenal. What the US and its allies must now do is find options between conventional war, or even nuclear holocaust, on the one hand, and
Aug. 22, 2017
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[Lee Jae-min] Peaceful, but not peaceful march
The June 24 incident should have never happened. This is the type of thing that wouldn’t happen in a country of law and order -- much less in a globalized metropolitan city like Seoul. Roughly 3,000 demonstrators “encircled” the US embassy in downtown Seoul marching with shouts and fist-raising, cutting off passage from the diplomatic compound to main streets. Demonstrations are part of daily life in Seoul, but such encircling (with the euphemism of “Human Belt”) has never happened in Seoul. Nor
Aug. 22, 2017
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[Doyle McManus] The trio that pulled US back from the nuclear brink
After threatening fire and fury, how does a superpower de-escalate? By scrambling its secretary of State, secretary of Defense and military chief to reassure foreign leaders that President Trump should be taken seriously, not literally.That’s what Rex Tillerson, James N. Mattis and Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have been doing for the past week — and it seems to have worked.Only eight days ago, Trump warned that if North Korea made any more threats against the Unite
Aug. 21, 2017