The government is renewing its efforts to advance the service industry. The Ministry of Strategy and Finance has disclosed a new action plan that called for, among other things, a basic law on the promotion of the service industry, the introduction of for-profit hospitals and allowing sales of nonprescription drugs at supermarkets and convenience stores.The renewed push for the service sector is w

The Financial Supervisory Service is in need of drastic reform. The recent series of problems at financial companies and corruption cases involving FSS officials have shown the regulator is not only ineffectual in promoting stability and soundness of the financial market but is corrupt to the bone. In his inaugural address on March 28, FSS Chairman Kwon Hyuk-se disclosed his vision of making the r

When pro-democracy protesters began rallying a few weeks ago, Syrian President Bashar Assad set out to change their tune. He has succeeded, though not quite as he hoped.At the beginning, demonstrators wanted the longtime dictator to embrace political reform, and he made some gestures in that direction, such as lifting a 48-year-old state of emergency law. Now, they don’t want him to embrace reform

Despite the rants of some conservative politicians and fringe scientists, it’s a fact that greenhouse gases produced by human activity contribute to global warming. Last week the Supreme Court considered one way that such emissions might be controlled: through a huge and unwieldy lawsuit brought by California and five other states against five power companies and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Se

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

With the war on terrorism far from over, Indonesia has seen mounting attacks on corruption fighters, despite the nationwide acceptance that graft is an extraordinary crime, separate from terrorism. A plan by the House of Representatives to revise Law No. 30/2002 on the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK) is widely seen as the latest foray intended to weaken the anticorruption drive.Sadly, the

Such is the Indian and Pakistani leadership’s obsession with high-profile “event-oriented” diplomacy that they sought to exploit the craze for cricket to revitalize people-to-people contact without taking two realities into consideration. One, that the cricketing calendar was overcrowded, the players so heavily committed, that squeezing in even a short bilateral series was virtually impossible; tw

The coming royal wedding in England and the beatification of Pope John Paul II in Rome will afford the world a chance to see how two ancient institutions ― the monarchy and the papacy ― reinforce their claim to perpetuity and continuing relevance by a show of pomp and pageantry. Supposed to be historical rivals, especially considering their religious wars since the 16th century, these two institut