The Korea Herald

[VOICE] Is green growth working?

Jul 2, 2012

After the Rio summit’s failure to adopt specific measures ...Is green growth working?“Green growth” has been an oft-used phrase in political, environmental and scientific circles in recent years. President Lee Myung-bak first announced his vision for environmentally sustainable, low-carbon economic growth in an address to the nation in August 2008. In July 2009, the government unveiled the Five Year Plan for Green Growth, which allocated some $84 billion for investment in growth drivers and infr
[Editorial] Lee’s brother in a fix

EditorialJul 2, 2012

Lee Sang-deuk, the elder brother of President Lee Myung-bak, is to be summoned by prosecutors today for questioning in connection with the ongoing savings bank scandal.Investigators have reportedly secured evidence suggesting that the former six-term lawmaker of the ruling Saenuri Party took hundreds of millions of won in bribes from Lim Seok, the disgraced chairman of Solomon Savings Bank, between 2008 and 2010. Solomon was suspended from operations in May due to capital shortages. The presiden
[Editorial] Delaying retirement

EditorialJul 2, 2012

As baby boomers have begun to retire en masse, the government is pushing to introduce a new system to help them stay in work longer. Under the proposed scheme, workers aged 50 and older will be given the right to request a shorter workweek, which will involve a corresponding reduction in pay, in order to put off their retirement. Officials of the Ministry of Health and Welfare say the scheme will not only help baby boomers ― people born between 1955 and 1963 ― stay longer at their current jobs b
China’s extreme birth control strategies

ViewpointsJul 2, 2012

Now that Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese dissident, is settling into a new life in the United States after decades of persecution by China’s venal, autocratic government, he is receiving a hero’s welcome he never anticipated and now does not appear to appreciate.Chen had dedicated much of his life to campaigning against involuntary abortions, sterilizations, tubal ligations and other means to forcibly prevent women from having a second child.Well, in the U.S., right-to-life advocates in Ameri
[Robert B. Reich] Wall Street seeks free rein overseas

ViewpointsJul 2, 2012

While all eyes are on the Supreme Court and Obamacare, a quieter battle is being waged against the president’s other major initiative, the Dodd-Frank financial reform act.Wall Street has already watered down or delayed most of Dodd-Frank. Now it wants to create a giant loophole, exempting its foreign branches from the law.Yet the overseas branches of Wall Street banks are where the banks have done some of their wilder betting. Four years ago, bad bets by American International Group’s London off
A health care victory for all Americans

ViewpointsJul 2, 2012

With a historic and just decision from the U.S. Supreme Court, the nation Thursday moved a giant step closer to a health care system that will work for all Americans.By ruling the individual insurance mandate constitutional under the taxing authority of Congress, the court preserved the delicately balanced structure of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.In order to make medical insurance accessible to the sick, Congress needed to ensure that plenty of healthy people were paying into
Moscow helps Kim Jong-un to consolidate power

ViewpointsJul 2, 2012

Russia claims it is willing to link divided Korea with energy pipelines and electricity grids. But its economic relations with North Korea indicate a return to the Cold War politics of the past. In 1948 Stalin sponsored the creation of the DPRK in the northern half of the Korean peninsula. The following year, Prime Minister Kim Il-sung travelled to Moscow to collect a 2 percent interest loan of 212 million Soviet Rubles. Some of this money was allocated to build the centrally-planned economy, bu
[Yuriko Koike] China goes bargain hunting around the world

ViewpointsJul 2, 2012

TOKYO ― Few recent elections have grabbed world attention in the way that Greece’s vote on June 17 did. Now that the center-right New Democracy, which finished first, has formed a coalition government with the center-left PASOK and the Democratic Left, the key issue for Prime Minister Antonis Samaras’s administration is whether it can implement the austerity measures agreed with Greece’s eurozone partners in exchange for continued support from the International Monetary Fund and the European Uni
[Xavier Vives] Banking disunion threatens euro

ViewpointsJul 1, 2012

BARCELONA ― The line of credit to Spain from fellow eurozone governments may help to stabilize a fragile banking system, at least in the short term, but it is a missed opportunity. Spain’s banking crisis provides a perfect opening to move towards a European banking union.In the medium term, help to Spain will merely reinforce the link between the sovereign and the banks’ problems, causing even greater fragmentation in the European banking market and pushing Spain closer to potential insolvency b
[Editorial] Electoral offenses

EditorialJul 1, 2012

Rep. Park Joo-sun, an independent, who had been charged with breaching election law, was sentenced to two years in prison at a district court last week. He will be removed from office unless his sentence is reduced to a fine of less than 1 million won or he cleared on appeal.At the trial, the prosecutor demanded one year in prison. But the bench came up with a harsher ruling, apparently complying with the Supreme Court’s earlier advice against unwarranted leniency for those charged with electora
[Editorial] On the homestretch

EditorialJul 1, 2012

President Lee Myung-bak’s administration needs to start wrapping up what it has been pursuing, instead of launching a new controversial project. But it appears to have ignored that it now has just eight months left until the end of its term in office, when it attempted in vain to conclude a treaty with Japan.On Friday, the Korean ambassador to Japan was scheduled to sign the General Security of Military Information Agreement with the Japanese foreign minister at a ceremony in Tokyo. To its humil
A win for Obama, a political issue for Romney

ViewpointsJul 1, 2012

The Supreme Court’s dramatic decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act gives President Barack Obama a major political victory. But the controversial measure now becomes a major election issue and its future will remain in doubt at least until voters render their verdict this November.That’s because presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney has pledged to scrap the plan Obama hopes will become his lasting political legacy, something he would be in position to do if he unseats the incumbent and
Choice of ‘Asian values’ or universal human rights?

ViewpointsJul 1, 2012

In the “caring and sharing community” that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations aims to be, hundreds of thousands of the Rohingya minority are stateless. Resisting deportation back to Myanmar, their “boatpeople” shuttle dangerously back and forth across the seas. Meanwhile, Indonesians protest the treatment of undocumented migrants in Malaysia, while Thailand’s neighbors fear spillover of that nation’s armed conflict in the south. At home, Papuans still report fears of extrajudicial killin
How Iran killed its future

ViewpointsJul 1, 2012

Imagine where the U.S. economy would be today if John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie or any of the magnates who helped turn America into an industrialized society had been gunned down by a revolutionary firing squad. In 1979, that is what happened in Iran to my grandfather, Habib Elghanian, Iran’s most prominent Jewish industrialist and philanthropist. My grandfather’s execution was not only a personal loss but a turning point for Iran.His execution and the subsequent fleeing
[Meghan Daum] Nora Ephron ― connector, cajoler, cheerleader

ViewpointsJul 1, 2012

If you’re a particular kind of writer, the kind with a taste for “social observation” and a belief in the divine partnership of unbridled humor and unapologetic honesty, Nora Ephron, who died last Tuesday, almost certainly fell into the category of Central Influence. If you’re a particularly lucky writer, Nora was not only an influence but a sort of literary mother hen with a cashmere-clad wing outstretched. She was a connector, a cajoler, a cheerleader ― maybe even a friend. I was among those l