President Lee signs into law today the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement which was ratified a week ago. The regular session of the National Assembly stays idle as opposition parties are boycotting it in protest of the government party’s unilateral passage of the FTA bill, claiming it as “null and void.”If opposition lawmakers do not turn up in the Assembly hall by Friday, the deliberation of the national budget will pass the legal deadline again this year. This legislative abnormality has been rep

An opposition lawmaker detonates a tear gas bomb at the rostrum of the National Assembly’s main chamber. Mobs in a nighttime rally beat up the Jongno police chief responsible for the public order of the heart of the capital. These two incidents related to protests against the Korea-U.S. free trade agreement demonstrate the state of lawlessness in the Republic of Korea.The National Assembly makes law and police execute it. When some individuals use violence to deny these institutions’ authority w

LOS ANGELES ― The failure of the U.S. Congressional Joint Committee on Deficit Reduction to reach agreement on budget cuts now sets the stage for $1.2 trillion in automatic reductions to begin in January 2013. Should these cuts go into effect, the U.S. Defense Department, which already must implement $450 billion in reductions over 10 years, will take half the hit. But pushback has already begun, with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta arguing that further reductions will impose “substantial risk

Whenever U.S. soldiers in Korea misbehave egregiously, Koreans naturally soul-search on whether USFK should withdraw. This is proper; soldiers sexually assaulting teenagers is horrific. The debate also usefully signals to the U.S. that Korea not be taken for granted. But in the end, Koreans have always hewn to the U.S., even after George W Bush famously alienated South Korea by placing N.K. on the ‘axis of evil.’ South Korea is the overwhelming beneficiary of a very one-sided relationship and te

A story ran in the British newspaper The Guardian recently with the following headline: South Korean parents told: Pre-school English ‘harmful.’ The sub-headline was: “Pressure group argues that money spent on early year classes is wasted and urges starting at age 10.” The operative word here is “pressure group,” but I’ll come back to that in a moment. For now, I will content myself with dissecting the arguments in the article, and dissection they need.The very first line in the article attribut

Korea joined the Development Assistance Committee of the OECD in November 2009, becoming the first country since the organization’s birth to go from aid recipient to donor. Since then, Korea has sought to chart a new course for development cooperation based on its unique growth experience.As part of such efforts, Korea will host the High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness, the world’s largest and highest-level conference on development aid. The three-day forum is to kick off tomorrow in Busan, wit

A senior judge at Incheon District Court has rekindled the debate over the nature of social networking sites ― are they a private or public space?The judge has caused a stir by posting a scathing message against President Lee Myung-bak and trade officials on his Facebook page after the ruling Grand National Party unilaterally passed a bill to ratify the Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement on Nov. 22.His posting read: “I will never forget Nov. 22, 2011, the day when the president and trade officials,

At a recent Capitol Hill rally for the administration’s job creation bills, Vice President Joe Biden urged America to hire more police ― even in this era of austerity ― or accept that crime will increase.His point is worth considering. Although crime in the United States on average has shown a historic decline since the early 1990s, a recent Rand Corp. report shows that a 10 percent increase in the size of a police force decreases the rate of homicide by 9 percent, robbery by 6 percent and vehic

Korea the younger, smarter brother of China? The clich cumulates too many “no-nos” to be sustainable. First, nations are not anthropomorphic entities you can compare on moral grounds. Second, Northeast Asian relations can be as touchy as minefields, and the epicenter of Confucianism is not the ideal playground for audacious familial metaphors. Ask a Chinese nationalist, and he’d rather consider South Korea and its actual sibling, North Korea, as mere provinces bound to get back to their Motherla

Barack Obama’s visit to Australia prompted the people of Darwin to take out $50,000 worth of insurance to cover him against the risk of a crocodile attack. The gesture seemed to delight the U.S. president. In a speech to about 1,000 Australians troops, his praise of the “legendary Diggers” (soldiers who fought in trenches) and “true blue Aussies” (Australians loyal to local values) went down a treat. The applause from troops at Robertson military base showed their support for a deployment plan t

A few weeks ago I wrote about an effort to put a centrist “third party” candidate on the presidential ballot next year, launched by an organization called Americans Elect. The privately funded group plans to stage a wide-open primary on the Internet, to enable voters to choose a ticket drawn from the middle of the political spectrum. Voters can propose anyone they like, but the process is designed for potential centrist candidates such as New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Sen. Evan Bayh,