According to Statistics Korea, aggregate household spending on private education dropped for the first time in 2010. Data shows that Korean parents spent a total of 20.9 trillion won last year on educating their children at private institutions, down 3.5 percent from a year ago. What does this imply? Does it mean the incumbent government’s war against private education has started to pay off? The

Somewhere in Havana, Fidel Castro is probably laughing out loud to see Hosni Mubarak lose his grip on power after 30 years of undisputed leadership. In Castro’s eyes, no doubt, the octogenarian Mr. Mubarak brought a world of trouble on himself by trying to mollify Western critics through the creation of a phony democracy that would give his regime a veneer of respectability.Mr. Mubarak was never a

Temperatures in Wisconsin are expected to rise by midcentury by an annual average of 6 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit, according to a new study by University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists and others in state government. Last month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that 2010 tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record based on global surface temperature. It was also the wett

Is the United States in decline? Twenty-five years ago Americans feared Japan would make us No. 2, but then in the 1990s our economy boomed and Japan’s stagnated. Now the fears have returned.China, India, Brazil and other emerging economies are roaring ahead. China, our closest competitor, holds more than 20 percent of the $4.3 billion in U.S. Treasury securities purchased by foreigners.Deficit re

Few bets are safer today than that we will see more uprisings in the Middle East in 2011, though maybe not everywhere. One of the ironies of revolution is that it is hardest to do where it is needed most. Hosni Mubarak was a dictator, but his rule was neither absolute nor bloodthirsty.Revolutions often produce something worse than they replace. But in the case of Egypt the nature of the protests g

If there is one German banker who isn’t taking gender equality seriously, it is Josef Ackermann.The Deutsche Bank AG chief executive officer is in hot water over flippant remarks he made about women serving on bank management boards. Now some German ministers are calling for mandatory quotas to be introduced, forcing companies to appoint women to top positions.If it happens, it will be following a

North Korean ruler Kim Jong-il turns 70 today. He officially becomes 69 but chronologists know that he celebrated his 40th birthday twice in 1981 and 1982 as Pyongyang’s legend writers for the Kim family were asked to cut a year from his real age to create a precise 30-year age difference from his father (born 1912) upon his designation as the heir to the power.Kim enters his 70s at a sensitive ti

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi is expected to visit Seoul next week, three months after he canceled a visit here last November. Three days before Yang’s scheduled arrival here on Nov. 26, North Korea made an artillery attack on Yeonpyeong Island in one of the worst provocations since the Korean War, killing two Marines and two civilians and destroying many homes in the fishing and farming co

During their meeting in Moscow last week, Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara and his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, discussed the bilateral territorial dispute over four islands off Hokkaido but failed to reach agreement as they reiterated their countries’ conventional stances.Japan-Russia relations have become seriously strained since Russian President Dmitry Medvedev visited one of the four isl

People across the world were mesmerized last week by the remarkable images of the dramatic events in Egypt that eventually propelled President Hosni Mubarak out of office on Friday.In the end, the courage, determination and fighting spirit of the millions of mainly young people that packed into streets in protest in many cities overcame a president who had been entrenched in power for over 30 year

As Cairo erupted in jubilation on Friday over the announcement that Hosni Mubarak had stepped down, I remembered another celebration of revolution I witnessed in 1979.I was visiting some Syrian leftists in a rickety wooden house in the heart of the old city of Damascus as they gathered around a crackly short-wave radio set and broke out the whiskey. They were celebrating the return of Ayatollah Ru

Is this 1989 in the Arab world?Twenty-two years ago, the Soviet Union’s police state began collapsing under its own weight ― leading to democracy and capitalism throughout Eastern Europe.A striking parallel is developing in the Mideast.Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians, protesting peacefully, forced President Hosni Mubarak, 82, to resign last week after 30 years of autocratic rule.The Egyptian ma