After a long lunar New Year holiday, ranging from five days to nine days, corporate enterprises are returning to business as usual. But some of them may have to brace for disruptions on their work sites, because the days of industrial peace may be numbered for them.The reason is that the Federation of Korean Trade Unions, a hitherto nonviolent labor umbrella group, has started to flex its muscles

Editorial Feb. 6, 2011

When China first opened up to the outside world 30 years ago, Chinese people applying for jobs at foreign-funded ventures learned that they had a better chance of getting the job by answering questions in the way a U.S. jobseeker would. For example, a Chinese engineer who had operated machine tools for 20 years would previously have modestly said “I know a little bit” when asked how familiar he wa

Viewpoints Feb. 6, 2011

In the height of the Great Depression, Myrna Jury was in economic despair, which explains her reply to the advertisement of a stranger who had run an ad in the Dec. 18, 1933, issue of the Canton (Ohio) Repository. The ad was titled “In Consideration of the White Collar Man!” and offered assistance from an anonymous source to families in need.Jury wrote and reported that her husband had been out of

Viewpoints Feb. 6, 2011

I demand a recount! Or a re-survey! Or some form of redress for the aspersions Travel + Leisure magazine has cast not only on the City of Angels but on all of us Angelenos.Recently, the magazine released a survey of travelers who, in all their wisdom, concluded that Los Angeles surpasses New York as the rudest city in America.Excuse me?My first reaction was fear that I would never again be able to

Viewpoints Feb. 6, 2011

By all accounts, Hosni Mubarak’s days are numbered in Egypt. The outside world sees two possibilities about the future of the largest country in the Middle East: It could become a second Iran, a nightmare for the globally-caring United States and the Western community in general, or the predominantly Islam nation of 80 million could gain democracy while remaining a friend and ally of Washington an

Editorial Feb. 1, 2011

In January 2008, when the transition committee for president-elect Lee Myung-bak decided to abolish the Ministry of Science and Technology to put his campaign pledge of small government into practice, an array of academics and industrialists raised strong objections. They feared that absence of a central administration agency responsible for promotion of science and technology would inevitably cau

Editorial Feb. 1, 2011

IMS Health Inc. operates in the shadows of the healthcare industry, gathering data that drug makers can use to sell medications more effectively. The data, however, are taken from the prescriptions that doctors write for their patients. That information is at the heart of a dispute over how far states can go to protect privacy ― a dispute that has reached the Supreme Court, and one that could broa

Viewpoints Feb. 1, 2011

China’s double-digital economic growth over the past years has helped it replace Japan as the world’s second largest economy. In terms of gross domestic product China exceeded Japan from the second quarter of 2010 and its full-year GDP was more than 39 trillion yuan ($5.93 trillion), as indicated by statistics from the National Bureau of Statistics. That means China now has the second largest glob

Viewpoints Feb. 1, 2011

A massive archive of documents leaked to al-Jazeera and Britain’s Guardian newspaper offers irrefutable proof that years of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians have been an empty sham. The papers make clear that the time has come for Palestinians and anyone interested in the cause of justice to abandon the charade of official diplomacy and pursue other, more creative and nonviolent path

Viewpoints Feb. 1, 2011

In his State of the Union address, President Obama said that repealing his health-care law would increase the deficit by $230 billion. While technically true according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, this statement is misleading.In CBO’s own words: “(the) legislation contained a set of provisions ... which CBO and (Joint Committee on Taxation) estimated would have a gross cost of about $

Viewpoints Feb. 1, 2011