Like most wars, NATO’s five-week-old campaign to overthrow Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi has turned out to be harder than it looked.The leaders of Britain, France and the United States, who launched the intervention, initially hoped Gadhafi’s regime would collapse quickly ― toppled either by popular uprisings or, more likely, by dissident generals.But that hasn’t happened, at least not yet.Instead, Gadh

Viewpoints April 29, 2011

Veteran singer Yoon Bok-hee said in an interview last week that she was afraid of watching TV these days because she sees so many entertainers who have undergone cosmetic surgery. “With your skin yanked and bone carved, can you correctly express your emotion? With your mouth reconstructed, can you sing normally?” she asked.The 65-year-old singer insists that a truly dedicated actor or singer shoul

Editorial April 28, 2011

The electorate in the Bundang B district said no to the status quo and, instead, endorsed a call for change when it elected Sohn Hak-kyu, leader of the main opposition Democratic Party, in the April 27 parliamentary by-election. Of great concern to the conservative ruling party and the liberal opposition party is whether the electoral outcome will prove to be a tempest in a teacup or a prelude to

Editorial April 28, 2011

The government in its monthly report released in mid-April downgraded its basic assessment of the Japanese economy for the first time in six months. It said the March 11 catastrophe is causing downward pressure on exports, production and consumption.Although there is a view that the economy will start to pick up around July, partly assisted by increased demand linked to reconstruction projects, th

Viewpoints April 28, 2011

Last week, Cuban President Raul Castro endorsed sweeping economic reforms, proposed term limits for government and Communist Party officials, and conceded that the party’s failure to groom a new generation of leaders will make it harder to find a successor.The proposed reforms could usher in major changes. For the first time since the 1959 revolution, the government would allow Cubans to own and s

Viewpoints April 28, 2011

In the think-tank argot popular in foreign policy circles, “mission creep” is an idiom for one of the garden-variety mistakes most people were warned against at their mother’s knee. Think “don’t throw good money after bad” and you’ve pretty well got the essence of the thing.Predictably, though, mission creep is what’s occurring in Libya. Each halting step the United States and its NATO allies take

Viewpoints April 28, 2011

I’ve long been an admirer of Greg Mortenson, the author of the phenomenal best-seller “Three Cups of Tea.” The book tells how he began building girls’ schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan after making a pledge to the villagers of Korphe, who had rescued him from a failed attempt to summit the world’s second-highest peak, K-2.To see his work, I traveled with Greg in 2007 to visit schools he’d built

Viewpoints April 28, 2011

In 1991 a lawsuit filed by a freelance journalist was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that the New York Times owed money to independent writers it had published for reselling their work from its archives. This was a big deal ― in theory, anyway.In fact, all it did was force publishers to get their lawyers to write bulletproof waivers for freelancers to sign. That waiver is a thing o

Viewpoints April 28, 2011

Few would question the “one-share, one-vote” rule as the basic principle behind corporate governance. Nothing would be wrong if the National Pension Service exercises its voting rights, mandated by the number of common shares it possesses, at a listed company’s meeting of shareholders.The National Pension Service is one of the largest institutional investors, which holds more than 5 percent of sto

Editorial April 27, 2011

Pressure is mounting on South Korea to resume dialogue with North Korea and withdraw opposition to resuming denuclearization talks in the absence of Pyongyang’s apology for its earlier unprovoked hostilities. As Winston Churchill famously said, jaw-jaw is always better than war-war. But what if the North Korean communists do not abandon the idea of war-war while in talks?North Korea has been knock

Viewpoints April 27, 2011

The fourth-grade teacher in Virginia who performed a mock slave auction in her classroom April 1 ― with the white kids pretending to buy and sell the black kids ― was duly chastised by school officials for her racial insensitivity. Given that she meant to be giving a lesson on the Civil War, she should also have been scolded for pedagogical inaccuracy.Think about it. If she really wanted to have h

Viewpoints April 27, 2011

What’s happening in Libya? When we last checked in, President Obama had said that the United States would participate in the U.N.-sponsored no-fly zone but that this was not ― repeat not ― a war to oust Moammar Gadhafi. Rather, the narrow purpose of the operation was to avert humanitarian disaster. He acknowledged that he would like to see Gadhafi go, but said that under no circumstances would gro

Viewpoints April 27, 2011