While your co-workers hover around the water cooler debating whether it matters if Mitt Romney bullied some kid in his youth, a formerly First World nation called Greece is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Why, you might ask, should Middle America pry its overworked eyes away from Jennifer Lopez gyrating around in a bodysuit on “American Idol” long enough to bother caring?Now replace “Greece” with “your bank.” It suddenly matters a little more, doesn’t it? What if your bank couldn’t loan yo

Viewpoints May 17, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 17, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 16, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 16, 2012

Korea faces an urgent need to reform the state-run health insurance system as its sustainability is threatened by a rapid increase in health care spending. During the past 10 years, per-capita heath spending has grown at nearly 8 percent a year, about double the nation’s economic growth rate. One factor driving up health care costs is the fee-for-service payment formula, under which the National Health Insurance Corp. reimburses hospitals for each and every service they provide to their patients

Editorial May 15, 2012

The non-mainstream factions of the strife-torn United Progressive Party have managed to launch an emergency leadership headed by Rep. Kang Ki-kab, seizing the initiative from the party’s widely criticized mainstreamers. Kang was appointed at a meeting of the party’s central committee, which was convened online from Sunday night to Monday morning without the presence of the representatives from the mainstream group. The committee’s meeting on Saturday was interrupted by violence. Some 100 members

Editorial May 15, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 15, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 15, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 15, 2012

Four savings banks that have recently been declared insolvent are found to have sustained huge losses from high-risk investments. Worse still, astronomical amounts of money have allegedly been embezzled by the managers of two of them. If they are not recouped, taxpayers will have to hold the bag.Prosecutors are widening their investigation into an allegation that Lim Suk, chairman of Solomon Savings Bank, embezzled 500 billion won from customer deposits and put the money into a maritime service

Editorial May 14, 2012

Unseasonably high temperatures have raised concerns about nationwide blackouts again this year. Demand for electricity remains high at a time when many power plants are under maintenance, reducing the power reserves to a worrisome level.For the first time in recent years, the nation experienced rolling blackouts last September ― a series of intentional electrical blackouts affecting small areas in succession as a means of conserving electricity when supply was low.Korea Electric Power Corp. had

Editorial May 14, 2012

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

Viewpoints May 14, 2012