The Ministry of Legislation has drawn fire from women’s organizations by interpreting child care leave in a way that could justify discrimination against female workers for taking leave to take care of their infants.The controversy was sparked by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, which sought the Legislation Ministry’s authoritative view on the eligibility of a second-grade female librarian, who took child care leave during her six years in the office, for promotion to a first-grade p

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

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

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

National Police Agency chief Cho Hyun-oh has remarked that “time has come for the police to start controlling the prosecution, ending prosecutors’ control of police.”This could be yet another emotional outburst from the police chief, who is hardly a man of great self-restraint, in the ongoing dispute between the two law-enforcement organizations. But he had very concrete reasons for pronouncing a reversal of the traditional police-prosecution relationship.The National Human Rights Commission rec

Rep. Koh Seung-deok of the Grand National Party is a first-term lawmaker from Seocho district of Seoul. He is called a “genius in Yeoeuido” with a diploma from Seoul National University College of Law, LL.M.’s from Yale Law School and Harvard Law School and J.D. from Columbia Law School. He passed the state judiciary examination as an SNU sophomore and the diplomatic and administration service exams in 1980, the year he graduated from the SNU law college with top honors. He also has CPA and pate

As of 2011, women teachers accounted for 75.8 percent in the nation’s primary schools, 66.8 percent in middle schools and 46.2 percent in high schools. These figures represent significant rise in the presence of female teachers at primary and secondary schools since a decade ago, when the respective figures were 68 percent, 59 percent and 35 percent.With violence in school reportedly growing in recent years, occasionally causing suicides of young students after extended suffering from bullying a

The United States has unveiled a new defense strategy that would slim down its military and rebalance it toward the Asia-Pacific region, away from Europe and the Middle East.Washington officials said the new strategy would have no impact on the U.S. forces stationed in South Korea. They reaffirmed the U.S. commitment to maintain peace on the Korean Peninsula and deter any provocations by North Korea.Yet policymakers in Seoul need to analyze the U.S. policy change carefully as it comes at a time

The prosecution has concluded that the cyber attack on the homepage of the National Election Commission on the day of the Oct. 26 Seoul mayoral by-election was jointly carried out by former aides to National Assembly Speaker Park Hee-tae and Rep. Choi Ku-sik.According to the prosecution, the National Assembly speaker’s aide, surnamed Kim, and Rep. Choi’s aide, identified only as Gong, plotted the distributed denial-of-service attack and had it executed through Gong’s friend, a computer expert. K

President Lee Myung-bak will embark on a three-day visit to China on Monday. His visit, coming several months ahead of the 20th anniversary of Seoul-Beijing diplomatic relations, will surely provide an opportunity for Lee and his Chinese counterpart, Hu Jintao, to review past achievements and map out the future course of action.South Korea and China, the only military ally of North Korea, have come a long way since they established diplomatic ties in August 1992. A retired Chinese diplomat, who

When the ruling Grand National Party was holding a national convention to select its leader, rumors that candidates distributed envelopes containing cash invariably made the rounds. None of them had been vetted until recently, and few came out to acknowledge they had been offered cash during the convention.But some of the rumors are most likely to be checked out this time, with one first-term lawmaker having said in public that he received an envelope containing 3 million won from a person close

Tensions are mounting in the ruling Grand National Party as the party’s emergency leadership council has started to discuss the highly sensitive issue of overhauling the process to pick candidates for parliamentary elections.Changing the nomination process is at the top of the reform agenda pushed by the emergency council, which was launched last month with the mandate to thoroughly reinvent the embattled party before the April general election.The task is basically about establishing a fair, tr

President Lee Myung-bak has renewed efforts to curb inflation ― again resorting to a strong-arm approach. In the first Cabinet meeting of the year Tuesday, Lee instructed officials to introduce a system in which an official is appointed for each of the major daily goods to monitor and manage its prices. Under the system, a section chief of, for instance, the Ministry of Strategy and Finance would be made responsible for checking the price movements of, say, napa cabbage. If cabbage prices are fo