The Korea Herald

[Benedicta Marzinotto] EU budget’s outsize political role

BRUSSELS ― The European Commission is now in the process of formulating the next Multiannual Financial Framework (MFF), a medium-term budget framework that fixes the European Union’s revenues and expenditures, including how much should be allocated annually to each objective and each country. The next one starts in 2014 ― and much more than money is at stake.The debate over the next year will be s

Viewpoints July 5, 2011

[Benedicta Marzinotto] EU budget’s outsize political role

[Editorial] Ruling party stewards

The Grand National Party has elected its new executive council, including the party chairperson, which will be responsible for the day-to-day operation of the governing party through next year’s parliamentary and presidential election campaigns. What is special about the five new stewards of the party, who will be added with two appointed members is that they are barred from presidential candidacy

Editorial July 5, 2011

[Editorial] Incomplete service

Upon resigning from his office Monday, Supreme Prosecutor General Kim Jun-kyu cited the legal maxim, “pacta sunt servanda,” which means “promises (agreements) must be kept.” He was referring to the National Assembly’s passage of a revision to the Criminal Procedure Act overriding an agreement between the prosecution and the National Police Agency concerning the distribution of criminal investigati

Editorial July 5, 2011

[Pankaj Mishra] Rising Turkey is no resurrection of Ottoman threat to Western world

Like many of Asia’s antique cities, Istanbul is a palimpsest, continuously inscribed by new movements of people and ideas, even as older writings on its parchment remain faintly visible. Few Istanbul neighborhoods manifest a multilayered identity as much as Kuzguncuk, which lies on the Asian shore of the Bosporus. Legend has it that Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century first settled h

Viewpoints July 5, 2011

[Kim Seong-kon] Is Korea a conqueror of the world?

We should be more discrete and modest when it comes to evaluating the popularity of Korean culture overseas.With the rise in popularity of Korean television dramas and movies across Asian countries, the headlines of our newspapers invariably proclaim, “Hallyu (the Korean Wave) has conquered Asia.” When our K-pop group singers succeeded in attracting a huge crowd in Paris and London, our media once

Viewpoints July 5, 2011

[Kim Seong-kon] Is Korea a conqueror of the world?

[William Pesek ] Commentary-Pesek

It’s a man’s world. That’s something, for better or worse, women in Asia can tell you. Japan and South Korea underutilize women with little regard for how it constrains growth. The Philippines sends all too many of them abroad as domestics to ship money home and support an inefficient economy. A preference for boys in India and elsewhere leads to elective abortion of female fetuses. Indonesia and

Viewpoints July 4, 2011

[Desmond Tutu] Ending the evil of nuclear weapons

CAPE TOWN ― Eliminating nuclear weapons is the democratic wish of the world’s people. Yet no nuclear-armed country currently appears to be preparing for a future without these terrifying devices. In fact, all are squandering billions of dollars on modernization of their nuclear forces, making a mockery of United Nations disarmament pledges. If we allow this madness to continue, the eventual use of

Viewpoints July 4, 2011

[Desmond Tutu] Ending the evil of nuclear weapons

[Fabrizio Tassinari] The unraveling of Europe’s peace

COPENHAGEN ― The European Commission recently unveiled long-awaited measures to bring neighboring countries in the Mediterranean and the former Soviet Union closer to Europe. On the same day, another department of the same commission presented proposals aimed at curbing visa-waiver programs for some non-European nationals. Few missed the irony of formulating two plans that pointed in opposite dire

Viewpoints July 4, 2011

[Fabrizio Tassinari] The unraveling of Europe’s peace

[By Ayaan Hirsi Ali] Obama’s Afghan withdrawal

On Wednesday, U.S. President Barack Obama announced he would order a gradual troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. On a superficial level there is nothing surprising about this decision. Obama is simply implementing what he had promised the American people in 2009 when he agreed to honor Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s request for more troops. The surge was always going to be temporary, especially in view

Viewpoints July 3, 2011

[By Ayaan Hirsi Ali] Obama’s Afghan withdrawal

[Nathan Gardels] China: Shaping new global system

BEIJING ― When the now 88-year-old Henry Kissinger sat down with Chairman Mao to discuss opening up China back in the 1970s, America was at the peak of its power. It surely never entered Kissinger’s mind at the time that less than half a century later, as the Communist Party of China confidently celebrates its 90th anniversary, he would be back in Beijing passing the baton of global leadership on

Viewpoints July 1, 2011

[Nathan Gardels] China: Shaping new global system

Proposal good for debate, not for policy

Let’s just make one thing clear: Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou did not endorse the “One China, two governments” idea revisited by the Chinese scholar Chu Shulong in an Apple Daily interview.Before we go any further, let’s look at some of the talking points in the Tsinghua University professor’s proposal. Published by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, Chu’s article

Viewpoints July 1, 2011

[Editorial] Violence-free Assembly

The Korean National Assembly has long been notorious for violence. In one of the worst cases that took place in December 2008, opposition lawmakers even brought hammers and electric saws to smash their way into an Assembly room where ruling party lawmakers gathered to table a bill on the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement. They were stopped by security officials who blasted water cannons and fire ext

Editorial June 30, 2011

[Editorial] Tackling household debt

The financial regulator has come up with a packages aimed at defusing the ticking household debt bomb. The measures, unveiled Wednesday, appeared more focused on slowing the rapid growth of household credit and gradually changing the debt profile than on offering incentives for indebted households to pay down their loans.Korea’s household credit, including loans and credit purchasing, stood at 801

Editorial June 30, 2011

[Jeffrey Goldberg] Tim Pawlenty girds for Romney, embraces Reagan

Here is something I’ve learned you shouldn’t say to candidates for next year’s Republican presidential nomination: “So, I guess you represent the John McCain-Lindsey Graham foreign-policy wing in this race.” I made this observation the other day to Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, and he winced. It wasn’t a run of the mill wince; it was, as they say, an audible wince. McCain and Gra

Viewpoints June 30, 2011

[Nazir al-Abdo] All in for freedom in Syria

My older brother, Bashir, 26, is one of the thousands of people who have been detained by Bashar Assad’s regime in recent weeks.At first, we didn’t know what had happened to him. He and two friends had been missing since they went to the northern city of Jisr al-Shoughur on June 10 to film secretly the protests and the army crackdown there. Then, last week, I was watching Syrian state television w

Viewpoints June 30, 2011

Articles by 류근하