The Korea Herald

[NajmuddiN a. Shaikh] Pragmatism in China’s U.S. ties

Perhaps there has been little in recent years in Sino-U.S. relations that has caused as much of an international furor as the case of the blind human rights activist Chen Guangcheng.This was not a case of a dissident seeking political asylum but of a blind man, a self-taught lawyer, who had won domestic and international renown for his promotion of human rights. He ran afoul of local authorities in Linyi prefecture because of his protests against forced abortions imposed arbitrarily by local aut

Viewpoints May 11, 2012

[NajmuddiN a. Shaikh] Pragmatism in China’s U.S. ties

commentary-Kamp

Reinventing NATO By Karl-Heinz Kamp 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 bil

Viewpoints May 11, 2012

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] Post-austerity growth strategies

NEW YORK ― This year’s annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund made clear that Europe and the international community remain rudderless when it comes to economic policy. Financial leaders, from finance ministers to leaders of private financial institutions, reiterated the current mantra: the crisis countries have to get their houses in order, reduce their deficits, bring down their national debts, undertake structural reforms, and promote growth. Confidence, it was repeatedly said, nee

Viewpoints May 10, 2012

[Joseph E. Stiglitz] Post-austerity growth strategies

[Rachel Marsden] Why France elected a Socialist president

France has elected only the second Socialist president in its history ― the first being Francois Mitterrand, who spent 14 years in the driver’s seat back when French presidential terms lasted seven years rather than five, and who made a hard-right turn away from economic socialism and toward spending cuts after his first two years in office. The best France can hope for now is that the newly elected Francois Hollande takes a similar plunge into a pothole of pragmatism and douses any budding soci

Viewpoints May 10, 2012

[Rachel Marsden] Why France elected a Socialist president

[Eli Park Sorensen] Thoughts on the relationship between life and work

In the satirical novel “Tristram Shandy” (published 1759-67), Laurence Sterne tells the story of Tristram Shandy, a gentleman who sets out to narrate “the history of myself.” Tristram wants to begin with the beginning of his life. This, however, turns out to be a complex task. Although the novel starts with a scene during which a woman is about to give birth to Tristram, our hero is actually not born until many pages later, about halfway through the novel. For Tristram realizes that before he ca

Viewpoints May 10, 2012

[Eli Park Sorensen] Thoughts on the relationship between life and work

[Editorial] Software ecosystem

A bill to revise the Software Industry Promotion Act was passed on May 2 along with some 60 others during the last session of the 18th National Assembly. The revised law, which goes into effect from next January, bans chaebol-affiliated IT service companies from working on public-sector projects.The new regulation is one of the initiatives the government has recently taken to jump-start the stagnating domestic software industry, which it has pledged to foster as one of the nation’s future growth

Editorial May 9, 2012

[Editorial] Digging own grave

The mainstream faction of the United Progressive Party is digging itself deeper into a hole as it struggles to retain power in the face of mounting pressure to take responsibility for alleged fraud in the primaries for the April 11 general election.The faction, led by Lee Jung-hee, one of the UPP’s four co-leaders, rejected the recommendation adopted by the party’s National Steering Committee over the weekend that the three proportional representation lawmakers-elect chosen through the primary r

Editorial May 9, 2012

Monsieur Normal should say ‘Non’ to Germany

It would be a mistake to interpret the election of France’s socialist presidential challenger, Francois Hollande, as portending a seismic shift for Europe’s second- largest economy. All indications are that Hollande doesn’t owe his victory to any passion among the electorate for a sweeping left-leaning platform. The defeated incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, is merely the latest leader felled by Europe’s economic crisis and the lassitude of its citizens. His flamboyant, hyperkinetic persona had grown

Viewpoints May 9, 2012

Austerity is strangling economies of eurozone

BERLIN ― The emergence of a united Europe is a process that has been going on for decades, characterized by progress but also by setbacks. There have been crises again and again in the history of European unification. Crucially, Europe has always found an answer to these crises and come out of them strengthened in the end. It will be the same this time if the political actors face up to the great challenges and muster the political will to overcome them.Since the founding of the European Coal an

Viewpoints May 9, 2012

To leave China or not, that is the question

Most dissidents in China have to face a simple but potentially life-changing question at some point in their lives: Should I stay or should I go?The answer, unfortunately, is not as straightforward.As the Chen Guangcheng incident has shown, deciding whether to leave China and go into exile is an extremely tough call.The blind legal activist was adamant that he did not want to leave his country during his stay in the United States embassy in Beijing, but changed his mind after leaving the secured

Viewpoints May 9, 2012

[Peter Singer] Are humans getting better?

MELBOURNE ― With daily headlines focusing on war, terrorism, and the abuses of repressive governments, and religious leaders frequently bemoaning declining standards of public and private behavior, it is easy to get the impression that we are witnessing a moral collapse. But I think that we have grounds to be optimistic about the future.Thirty years ago, I wrote a book called “The Expanding Circle,” in which I asserted that, historically, the circle of beings to whom we extend moral consideratio

Viewpoints May 9, 2012

[Peter Singer] Are humans getting better?

Lame attempts to shut off Afghan heroin spigot

A Russian source recently brought an obscure but disturbing article to my attention. Published last month by a little-known online journal called the Oriental Review, the piece, “Active Endeavor And Drug Trafficking,” proposed that not a single gram of heroin has been confiscated on the Mediterranean Sea since the inception of NATO’s Operation Active Endeavor, a maritime operation launched a month after the Sept. 11 attacks with the mission of “monitoring shipping to help detect, deter and prote

Viewpoints May 8, 2012

[Daniel Fiedler] Multiculturalism thrives in Korea

Just over 100 years ago Shin Chae-ho, a Korean independence activist and historian, published a Korean history book in which he set forth the concept of Korean pure blood. He created this concept as a counter to the Japanese attempts to assimilate the Korean people. At that time the Japanese were trying to convince the Korean people that they were of the same racial stock. Shin’s new mythology was therefore necessary to protect Korea and its culture. Fast forward to the present day and South Kor

Viewpoints May 8, 2012

[Daniel Fiedler] Multiculturalism thrives in Korea

Peace with Palestine first

HAIFA ― Not long ago, a Dutch journalist interviewed me about the Iranian nuclear question. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has allegedly banned politicians from giving interviews on the subject, so the journalist had no choice but to seek other candidates, perhaps more “intellectual,” but with no authoritative information to offer. The journalist asked me, first, if I thought that Israel would launch an attack against Iran’s nuclear plants; second, if I thought that it would be worth

Viewpoints May 8, 2012

Shortcut culture mars China’s reputation

China is facing a product-quality scandal once again, another in a seemingly endless string ― though right now the blind dissident’s great escape last week and the Bo Xilai family cataclysm are smothering all news of it.Still, the new scandal and the Bo case derive from a single cultural cause.A few days ago, the state announced that it has detained 54 suspects, shut down 80 “illegal production lines” and seized 77 million gelatin capsules used for prescription drugs, all of them heavily contami

Viewpoints May 7, 2012

Articles by Yu Kun-ha