The moratorium declared by a fiscally strained Seongnam City in June 2010 prompted the Board of Audit and Inspection to look into the books of 49 local administrations. Its findings, made public earlier this week, showed that Seongnam was not the only spendthrift municipality. Some of the municipalities, if no action were to be taken, would undoubtedly follow the footsteps of Seongnam in the near future. No less alarming is that officials cooked the books to produce non-existent surpluses. A cas

Like everybody else, National Assembly Speaker Park Hee-tae deserves to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. This basic right should hold even though a prosecutor raided the home of one of his erstwhile aides for search and seizure as part of a criminal investigation into an allegation that he bought votes for his 2008 election to the chairmanship of the ruling Grand National Party.But it does not mean that he should allow himself to retain the top post of the legislature. Instead, he shoul

Of all the realizations Barack Obama has made in three years in the White House, this may be the most crucial: The U.S. is a Pacific nation. Odd as it sounds, the U.S. spent the past decade forgetting a fact that’s obvious from consulting a map or tracking container ships. When George W. Bush’s administration bothered with Asia, it was all terrorism all the time. Quite odd, considering how reliant the largest economy became on Asia’s money during his tenure. The region became America’s banker. O

Taiwan is holding presidential elections this week, and viewed from the United States it almost seems as if Ralph Nader has moved to the island.For Americans, the Taiwanese vote is not merely an interesting, distant piece of news. China remains fixated, even obsessed, with the island, determined to take it back one day. And while the United States is not obligated to fight on behalf of the Taiwanese, successive administrations for half a century have made it clear they would not tolerate a Chine

The conflict between Iran and the West just keeps heating up, with the Iranians announcing over the weekend that they have begun to enrich uranium at a second major facility, a well-defended site outside the city of Qom. Given the high stakes, it’s valuable to take another look at the main source of the tension: Iran’s nuclear-weapons program. That this enterprise is active is widely considered a given in the U.S. In fact, the evidence, contained in a November report of the International Atomic

Last week, Israelis had one more reason to be proud of themselves ― one of their cities was singled out for a rare honor. The Canadian newspaper Globe and Mail selected the “most creative cities” of the world.Leaning on the Global Creativity Index, devised at the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the newspaper looked at the three T’s (technology, talent and tolerance) that have made cities shine.The Globe and Mail even went a step further, in

The main opposition Democratic Unified Party is undertaking an important experiment that could reshape the election culture in Korea. It has opened its leadership election process to ordinary citizens and allowed them to vote through their mobile phones. The party’s unprecedented move is being closely watched by rival parties as well as political analysts as it could also affect the outcomes of the coming parliamentary and presidential elections.According to the DUP, more than 643,000 citizens h

Lotte Mart has joined a small but growing number of companies that help people continue to work beyond its mandatory retirement age, which is set at 55. The discount store chain announced Monday it would hire 1,000 senior employees aged between 56 and 60 under indefinite-term contracts this year. According to the company, the senior workers will be treated the same as regular employees. They will be entitled to the four social insurance benefits ― national pension, health insurance, employment i

President Barack Obama has established that he’s done with Congress for the rest of his term. Feeling chumped after Republicans wouldn’t reach agreement with him on a broad deficit-reduction agreement, Obama has decided it’s time to campaign against GOP leadership of the House and Senate.Thus the dubious move to ignore the law and appoint a head of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau without the consent of the Senate.We can’t really blame Obama. Republicans have been playing gotcha with

As he unveiled his administration’s new blueprint for U.S. defense strategy last week, President Obama sought to vaccinate himself against charges that he was gutting the nation’s military.Even after the strategy is fully implemented, he said, “the defense budget will still be larger than it was at the end of the Bush administration.”So it seemed a little odd when, an hour later, the second-ranking official in Obama’s Pentagon presented what sounded like a rebuttal.“You have, over the next four

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin’s reaction to Moscow protesters perfectly illustrates how the former Soviet spy chief can masterfully leverage classic subversion strategies typically found in espionage to undermine the opposition and even ridicule the concept of democracy.In the wake of the Russian parliamentary vote in early December, a Russian opposition leader far more radically communist than Putin was jailed, and protesters hit the streets to protest what they considered electoral fra

When a conglomerate CEO is indicted on charges of large-scale embezzlement after strenuous investigation by prosecutors, he is normally expected to do three things. The first is to apologize to shareholders for the trouble caused by his personal activities, even before criminal procedures are completed. The second is to devote all his energy to attaining his group’s business targets, thereby helping recover the tangible and intangible losses inflicted on its finances and image. Third, is to take