The Korea Herald

[Lee Jae-min] BSE doesn’t light candles this time

It was exactly four years ago when candlelight vigils almost engulfed Korean society because of the concern over the bovine spongiform encephalopathy, widely known as a mad cow disease. The recent occurrence of the BSE in California in late April caused a deja vu feeling, but has not led to the repetition of similar protests.Upon the return of the on-site verification team from the visit to the United States, confirming that the April outbreak is “atypical” and the risk has been found to be cont

May 17, 2012

[Lee Jae-min] BSE doesn’t light candles this time

Reinventing NATO

ROME ― This month, NATO will hold its next summit in Chicago. Unlike European Union summits, which take place almost monthly, NATO’s are infrequent. This helps to explain the inflated rhetoric that surrounds them: the November 2010 summit in Lisbon, for example, was described as nothing less than “the most important in NATO’s history.” Will the Chicago summit prove to be an exception to this rule?For a while, that seemed likely, with the meeting initially billed as an “implementation summit,” at

May 17, 2012

What Dimon didn’t tell you on ‘Meet the Press’

Without even waiting a decent interval for mourning, JPMorgan Chase Chairman Jamie Dimon launched his defense campaign over the disclosure that he presided over a $2 billion trading loss in derivatives within days of the disclosure itself, choosing the comforting confines of NBC’s “Meet the Press” for the campaign kick-off.His argument is plainly designed to distract from the right way to think about JPM’s fiasco, which is that it’s exactly the sort of thing that regulations should forbid banks

May 17, 2012

[Ian Bremmer] The G-Zero world may serve the U.S. better

NEW YORK ― The 2008 financial crisis marked the end of the global order as we knew it. In advance of the upcoming G8 summit, it is impossible to overlook the fact that, for the first time in seven decades, the United States cannot drive the international agenda or provide global leadership on all of today’s most pressing problems.Indeed, the U.S. has trimmed its presence abroad by refusing to contribute to a eurozone bailout, intervene in Syria, or use force to contain Iran’s nuclear breakout (d

May 17, 2012

[Ian Bremmer] The G-Zero world may serve the U.S. better

Europe must face ugly reality of Greek exit

A Greek exit from the euro area has the potential to be the European Union’s most economically and politically destructive event of a generation. Unfortunately, Europe has reached the point where it must prepare for such an outcome. Whether Greeks want it or not, circumstances could soon force their country to return to the drachma. Europe’s leaders, as Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker hinted, might extend Greece’s deadlines to meet the budget targets required for rescue money, but

May 16, 2012

[Anders Fogh Rasmussen] A bond that sustains NATO

BRUSSELS ― Many years ago, I took my children to visit the sites of the D-Day landings in Normandy. I wanted them to understand the sacrifices that others had made so that Europe and North America could enjoy the benefits of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We saw the beaches whose names echo through history ― Omaha, Utah, Juno. Those beaches remain a memorial to the idea that, together, we can overcome any threat, no matter how great.We understand the future that could have befallen

May 16, 2012

[Anders Fogh Rasmussen] A bond that sustains NATO

Don’t let Washington ban cell phones in your car

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood slapped down Reuters for reporting a few weeks ago that he wants “a federal law to ban talking on a cell phone or texting while driving any type of vehicle on any road in the country.” His press secretary, Justin Nisly, called the report inaccurate, saying LaHood merely wants “Congress to incentivize states to pass anti-texting and driving legislation, similar to the approach taken to prevent drunk driving and promote seat belt use.” It’s not a reassuring comm

May 16, 2012

Acting Speaker Chung, Korea is not Germany

Addressing New York’s Korea Society last week, South Korea’s acting National Assembly Speaker, Chung Ui-hwa, argued that today’s South Korea can take a cue from how 1980s West Germany overcame Germany’s Cold War division. To quote verbatim, Chung said, “The (conservative) Christian Democratic Union, under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl, was not happy with the Socialist Democratic Party’s appeasement toward East Germany. Nevertheless, the CDU government inherited the policy of Ostpoliti

May 16, 2012

[Meghan Daum] Obama out of place as American president

As devotees of Barack Obama know all too well, qualities that made him so attractive as a candidate ― an affinity for subtle arguments, a tendency to carefully weigh his options ― have at times proved less useful in his role as president. That carefulness has been read as indecisiveness. The subtle arguments have sounded, to some ears, like hedging.In response, the president has simplified his rhetoric. The nuances of the 2009 Cairo speech about relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world ha

May 16, 2012

[Meghan Daum] Obama out of place as American president

[Kim Myong-sik] The story of two pocket watches

Yun Bong-gil bought a pocket watch at a store in the French Concession of Shanghai one day in April 1932. The 24-year-old Korean exile spent nearly all his money for the purchase, keeping only a couple of Chinese banknotes in his wallet.The following morning on April 29, he had breakfast with “Baekbeom” Kim Gu, head of the Korean provisional government in Shanghai, at the house of another Korean expatriate. After eating, Yun asked Kim to exchange their watches. “Sir, my watch is a rather expensi

May 16, 2012

[Kim Myong-sik] The story of two pocket watches

[David Ignatius] A compelling plan for Iran talks

WASHINGTON ― Let’s assume the signals from the White House and Tehran are reliable, and that Iran is serious about an agreement to remove its existing stockpile of 20 percent enriched uranium from the country and stop producing more. What happens then? This question of “next steps” in the Iran nuclear talks is important, because neither side is likely to commit to the first set of “confidence-building” measures“ unless it knows where the process is heading. Iran feels it has been tricked in the

May 15, 2012

[David Ignatius] A compelling plan for Iran talks

Can cleaner cookstoves help save the world?

Did the slick animations in the Girl Effect video that’s been viewed 3.6 million times compel you to buy soccer cleats for a South African girl? Maybe Matt Damon persuaded you to invest in Water.org so you can supply clean water and toilets to the world’s poor. Perhaps you’ve bought something (RED) to fight AIDS? If you haven’t, you’ve missed out on a big trend. Overseas development assistance is going private. More and more, private charities, foundations and nongovernment organizations are joi

May 15, 2012

When there is no evidence

The British government are deploying missile launchers across London and have posted the Royal Navy’s largest ship in the Thames as part of the security for the Olympic Games to respond to a terrorist attack although there is no evidence that such an attack will take place.For the record, I would like to say that if there is a terrorist attack in the U.K. during the Olympics it will be far from the sporting event where there is no security buildup. Terrorists act in this way to remind us that th

May 15, 2012

About Okinotorishima

Japan has touched off strong opposition from its neighbors by promoting an unreasonable project aimed at maximizing its maritime profits. The main point of the project is to acquire an exclusive economic zone and continental shelves based on Okinotorishima, a coral reef about 1,740 km south of Tokyo, which is only 70 centimeters above the surface of the sea. The EEZ that Japan is about to declare through Okinotorishima is 430,000 square kilometers, which is even wider than the nation’s total lan

May 15, 2012

Newest Kennedy may renew family’s franchise

For more than half a century, the Kennedys were a force in U.S. politics. Their dominance began with John F. Kennedy’s 1960 presidential run and lasted until the death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 2009. The family’s return as a major political presence isn’t imminent; it may not be that far off, though. A candidate for a Massachusetts seat in the U.S. House of Representatives is Joseph P. Kennedy III, the grandson of Robert F. Kennedy and a grandnephew of the president and the senator. He’s r

May 15, 2012

[Kim Seong-kon] Living in Korea tough but hopeful

When I gave a talk at the State University of New York at Buffalo a few weeks ago, I briefly mentioned my father’s turbulent personal history. During the Japanese occupation, he was arrested by the Japanese police on the charge of being a non-conforming, anti-Japanese political dissident who owned Marx’s “Das Kapital.” He was found guilty and consequently had to spend six months in prison. After the liberation, my father decided to become an interpreter and worked for the U.S. Military Governmen

May 15, 2012

[Kim Seong-kon] Living in Korea tough but hopeful

Europe can save union for 320 euros per German

Europe’s chaotic political landscape is doing an excellent job of exposing a fundamental flaw in the euro area: the lack of a mechanism to revive growth in hard-hit economies. Recent elections in Greece, France and Italy, where anti-austerity candidates made major gains, have demonstrated the failure of policies that seek to solve the euro area’s debt problems through spending cuts and tax increases alone. Economic strife has brought Greece to the brink of a political breakdown and exit from the

May 14, 2012

[Noeleen Heyzer] Shock-proofing Asia’s economies

BANGKOK ― Uncertainty and volatility have quickly become the “new normal” of the global economy. For several reasons, this turbulent external environment poses the most significant threat to Asia-Pacific growth in 2012.One of this environment’s main features is the ongoing weakness of major developed economies. The expected V-shaped global recovery, from the depths of the 2008 financial crisis, proved short-lived. The world economy entered a second stage of crisis in 2011, owing to eurozone’s so

May 14, 2012

[Noeleen Heyzer] Shock-proofing Asia’s economies

A fundamental solution to adoption problems

Korea was very poor when the Korean War ended in 1953. It was the second poorest country in the world at that time. So, the government carried out overseas adoption for orphans and children dying of starvation as a national policy with the intention of keeping those children alive. The government’s adoption policy is still going on without change. About 1,000 children are being adopted to foreign countries each year. Absolute poverty was the fundamental reason for adoption until the 1970s. Recen

May 14, 2012

For Volcker rule, JPMorgan’s $2 billion loss says it all

It’s never polite to say I told you so, but JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s $2 billion trading loss has proponents of a tougher proprietary trading ban saying . . . well, you know what. JPMorgan’s admission is a shocker. The bank said the losses resulted from errors, sloppiness and bad judgment, which top bank executives didn’t know about or understand until it was too late. On Wall Street and around the globe, JPMorgan was a standard-setter for risk management. If regulators can’t trust JPMorgan to get

May 14, 2012