Former independent presidential candidate Ahn Cheol-soo has returned home, pledging to “walk the thorny road to usher in a new politics.” Ahn’s plan to run in the April by-election in Seoul’s Nowon C district has left the main opposition Democratic United Party flustered. The party’s leaders are anxious, not knowing how to respond.The party is split over whether it should field a candidate of its own or return the favor Ahn made in the presidential election. He dropped out of the presidential ra

Editorial March 13, 2013

Plans are shaping up for a household debt write-off, one of the key campaign pledges of President Park Geun-hye. The Financial Services Commission is planning to launch an 870 billion won debt-rescheduling fund as early as the end of this month.The envisioned fund, dubbed the “People’s Happiness Fund,” will purchase overdue debts from financial companies and then write them down so that delinquent borrowers can resume debt repayment.Eligible for the debt rescheduling program are people who have

Editorial March 13, 2013

The forgotten war has just turned 10 years old, but of course almost no one took notice.Since early 2003, at least 300,000 people have been killed. More than 2 million others have been forced from their homes. And day by day, even now, the problems are worsening.More people fled to feculent refugee camps in the first two months of 2013 than in all of the previous year. The reason: intensifying aerial bombardments and indiscriminate military raids.The surviving victims of this terrible, unending

Viewpoints March 13, 2013

There are worse things than learning, as the residents of Shanghai did this week, that the source of the water for your morning shower and tea was contaminated by at least 5,916 dead pigs. You might find out that lamb you ate for dinner was duck soaked in toxic chemicals. That those dumplings you had as a late-night snack were fried in oil recovered from a gutter running beside an open sewer. Or worse yet, that the baby formula you’ve fed your newborn is laced with a plasticizer that damages kid

Viewpoints March 13, 2013

Shortly after the financial crisis spread around the globe like a plague, the world’s leaders developed what they thought would be an antidote. Working through the Group of 20, they agreed to adopt common rules for all financial companies, no matter where they operated. The global system would be less risky, the thinking went, if derivatives dealing, an opaque $639 trillion market, worked more like stock trading on exchanges. If large banks had more capital, they would be able to absorb losses s

Viewpoints March 12, 2013

Anyone still in need of proof that austerity isn’t fixing the euro area’s debt crisis should visit Portugal. Hundreds of thousands of Portuguese took to the streets of Lisbon to protest against economic austerity on March 2, and the only surprise is that they didn’t do so earlier. Portugal is the euro area’s clearest example of how austerity is killing the patient, with the ill effects of counterproductive fiscal retrenchment unfolding before our eyes. We rarely hear about Portugal’s economic tr

Viewpoints March 12, 2013

Social networking makes teenagers of us all. Lots of my ridiculously successful friends ― some of whom appear regularly on television, give TED talks and are the kind of people who get harassed in restaurants by their fans (while my fans remain remarkably good-mannered and never, ever come over to introduce themselves or say a word) ― will still not permit themselves to have a Facebook account because the thought of people unfriending them is terrifying.One of these women ― you would recognize h

Viewpoints March 12, 2013

The Seoul Metropolitan Office of Education has launched an investigation into alleged admission corruption at Younghoon International Middle School, one of the two special-purpose middle schools in Seoul set up to nurture global talent.The allegations were put forward last week by a member of the Education Committee of the Seoul Metropolitan Council. The official said that a parent told him last month that she paid the school 20 million won for her son’s admission. As the whistleblower also told

Editorial March 11, 2013

Many citizens in the industrial city of Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province, are seriously thinking about relocating as they are terrified by an unending series of industrial disasters.This month alone, three industrial accidents took place, spooking the city’s 400,000 citizens. Just as a burned child dreads the fire, they are still seared by the memory of the massive hydrofluoric acid leak last September that left five dead and many more injured.On March 7, a large oil tank containing 4,000 liters

Editorial March 11, 2013

The 13-hour filibuster in the U.S. Senate carried on between noon Wednesday and early Thursday morning by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has so many fascinating angles to it, it’s hard to know where to start.There’s the fact that it was one of the few actual standing filibusters these days, and one of the longest in history. Paul openly stated his reasons for blocking a vote and talked as long as he could in service of his mission.There’s the fact that while Paul was wrongly standing in the way of Presi

Viewpoints March 11, 2013