The Korea Herald

[Shahid Javed Burki] India-Pakistan diplomatic test match

LAHORE ― In 2005, during a visit to Islamabad, I met Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and told him of a conversation I had had with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India. The Indian leader, whom I have known for years, had said that he wanted better relations with Pakistan as one his legacies.Musharraf’s response was interesting. He said he had the same aspiration, but that it would need effo

Viewpoints April 13, 2011

[Shahid Javed Burki] India-Pakistan diplomatic test match

[Editorial] Bills of evil

In this age of plastic cards, keeping a few 50,000-won bills in wallet would not make one feel particularly comfortable. In everyday life, you rarely need to use the light brown note graced by the elegant portrait of virtuous Joseon era lady Shin Saimdang, which was first issued in June 2009. Yet, the Bank of Korea reports that some 400 million 50,000-won notes are “in circulation,” believe it or

Editorial April 12, 2011

[Editorial] Suh’s choice

Suh Nam-pyo, a Korean-born professor emeritus at MIT with more than 70 patents in mechanical engineering and experience as vice president of the U.S. National Science Foundation, assumed presidency at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology in July 2006. At the time, he set the goal of making KAIST one of the 10 best research universities in the world. He followed up with reform mea

Editorial April 12, 2011

[David Ignatius] The paradoxical power of the weak

CAIRO ― The weak have a new power in the modern media age: Their suffering is visible to millions of well-intentioned people around the world who are likely to support humanitarian intervention to rescue them from their plight. But there’s a dangerous corollary to this new power of the weak: It can lead disorganized groups to start fights with established authorities that they can’t finish ― unles

Viewpoints April 12, 2011

[David Ignatius] The paradoxical power of the weak

[Kim Seong-kon] What to do with so many jobless Ph.D.s

There were times when academic doctors were so rare in Korea that it was an honor to be called Dr. Kim or Dr. Park. When Rhee Syngman, a Princeton Ph.D., was elected the first president of South Korea in 1948, the Korean people found their political leader’s academic title so fascinating that they preferred to call him Dr. Rhee instead of President Rhee. Indeed, there were days when if a person re

Viewpoints April 12, 2011

[Kim Seong-kon] What to do with so many jobless Ph.D.s

[Gregory Rodriguez] Obama: Black and more so

It could have been a historic teaching moment. Instead, President Obama, the most famous mixed-race person in the world, checked off only one race ― black ― last year on his census form. And in so doing, he missed an opportunity to articulate a more nuanced racial vision for the increasingly diverse country he heads.The president also bucked a trend. Last month, the Census Bureau announced that th

Viewpoints April 11, 2011

[Jameel Jaffer] National security: When secrecy is a weapon

In a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo spoke with surprising candor about the CIA’s “targeted killing” program. He discussed the scope of the program (about 30 people are on the “hit list” at any given time), the process by which the CIA selects its targets (Rizzo was “the one who signed off”) and the methods the CIA uses to eliminate them (“The Predator is the

Viewpoints April 11, 2011

[Meghan Daum] Let’s all get off the term ‘on steroids’

Not so long ago, the way to convey that something was extreme was to simply call it extreme (“X” for short.) There were extreme sports (think bungee jumping), extreme tourism (think traveling in order to bungee jump) and, of course, the “Extreme Makeover” television franchise, which took self-improvement and home improvement to new levels by throwing in hefty doses of plastic surgery and new const

Viewpoints April 11, 2011

[Meghan Daum] Let’s all get off the term ‘on steroids’

[Jacques Attali] Bangladeshi government’s shameful treatment of Yunus

PARIS ― Rarely does a man in the mold of Muhammad Yunus come along who has devoted his life to the least fortunate among us.Instead of living the peaceful and comfortable life he could have had, he chose to engage in a crusade against poverty through the use of micocredit that has succeeded far beyond any expectations.Yet, as happens so often in history, no man seems to be a prophet in his own cou

Viewpoints April 11, 2011

[Jacques Attali] Bangladeshi government’s shameful treatment of Yunus

[David Ignatius] Egyptian democracy’s growing pains

CAIRO ― The political battle for Egypt’s future began in earnest last month when the country’s ruling military council held a referendum to approve its amendments to the constitution. The Muslim Brotherhood, backing the military, easily won that first test of Egypt’s new democracy, with 77 percent of the public supporting their recommended vote of “yes.” But the secular Tahrir Square revolutionari

Viewpoints April 10, 2011

[David Ignatius] Egyptian democracy’s growing pains

[Susan Straight] A noble profession

At a time when teachers and their unions are under fire across the nation, my eldest daughter just had a much-anticipated interview with Teach for America. She will graduate from college in May and hopes to be a teacher in the fall.She was worried that I’d be disappointed she didn’t feel a desire for graduate school.But I was thrilled. Since graduating from college in 1984, I’ve taught GED (Genera

Viewpoints April 10, 2011

[Ian Bremmer] Measuring the revolutionary wave

NEW YORK ― A prediction three months ago that popular protests would soon topple a dictatorship in Tunisia, sweep Hosni Mubarak from power in Egypt, provoke civil war in Muammar el-Gadhafi’s Libya, and rattle regimes from Morocco to Yemen would have drawn serious skepticism. We knew that the tinder was dry, but we could never know how or when, exactly, it would combust. Now that it has, how far ca

Viewpoints April 10, 2011

[Ian Bremmer] Measuring the revolutionary wave

[Editorial] Party in crisis?

Bundang B in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, has been a conservative electoral district. One of Seoul’s wealthy suburbs, it has been carried by the ruling Grand National Party in the past. Is the conservative ruling party assured of another win in the April 27 parliamentary by-election?The answer is hardly, as evidenced by the latest opinion poll. The liberal Democratic Party’s chairman, Sohn Hak-kyu

Editorial April 8, 2011

Overcoming the nuclear crisis in Japan

The crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant does not warrant optimism. Nuclear fuel in the cores of the No. 1, No. 2 and No. 3 reactors is believed to have been severely damaged. In the No. 4 reactor’s storage, where spent nuclear fuel is kept, water evaporated at one point, and a hydrogen explosion released radioactive substances into the environment.The governmen

Viewpoints April 8, 2011

[Tim Rutten] Wedge issue that’s losing its point

Wedge issues are the rhetorical enablers of the bitterly partisan politics that have disfigured our national conversation in recent years.They’re the controversial questions on which significant numbers of voters hold views that admit no compromise or nuanced disagreement. Candidates raise them to divide their constituents and to morally discredit their opponents. Abortion is a classic wedge issue

Viewpoints April 8, 2011

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