It’s no secret that some Korean public officials have misused overseas training programs, financed with precious taxes, by enjoying them as their freebie tours abroad. Those programs, thanks to such accumulative scandals over time, now tend to be considered a waste of government money. Had it not been for those few who neglected their duties and responsibilities as civil servants, overseas training programs could be welcomed or even encouraged as valuable opportunities to learn exemplary cases f

PARIS ― There’s a good chance that American voters will screw up the presidential election.“How could you say such a thing when in a democracy the people are, by definition, correct?” you ask.Because there’s no such thing as collective intelligence, that’s why. Sure, there are individuals within a given society who happen to be informed and intelligent ― but it requires work to overcome the sort of inertia that has so many other people in that society pinned to their recliners watching “Dancing

My late father taught me that what defines a principle is the willingness to adhere to it even when that adherence hurts. Maybe that’s why the newfound appreciation of the Electoral College among many of my friends on the left has struck me as a weirdly compelling spectacle. After the 2000 election, when George W. Bush lost the popular vote but (after the Florida debacle) won a majority of Electoral College votes, liberal commentators spent years calling for the direct election of the president.

The third presidential debate, concerned mainly with foreign policy, was frustrating for many commentators because it gave them little to chew on. What’s to debate when there’s so much agreement ― or the semblance of it, at least? Our frustration is quite the opposite: There is genuine agreement between Democrats and Republicans on some issues and yet that consensus fails to drive action. We see this playing out especially on immigration. The larger immigration picture certainly remains contenti

After Monday night’s third presidential debate, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., who was a stand-in for Mitt Romney during President Obama’s prep sessions, said he never expected Romney to agree with President Obama’s timetable for leaving Afghanistan in 2014.For most of the campaign, after all, Romney has attacked Obama for setting any date at all for withdrawing combat troops from Afghanistan ― at 11 years, now the nation’s longest war. Yet the Republican did a reverse on Monday, promising that he to

In last week’s debate, President Barack Obama turned to Republican Mitt Romney and said, “Governor, you’re the last person who’s going to get tough on China.”I hope Obama is right.The tougher-than-thou poses on China have become routine in presidential campaigns, but these threats, if carried out, could hit American consumers with higher prices and spark damaging tit-for-tat responses from Beijing.Obama, with his ties to organized labor, was always expected to be a reluctant free trader. He’s li

If a massive blackout occurs during a severely cold winter in Hokkaido, many people’s lives will be in danger.The government and Hokkaido Electric Power Co. must avert a potential electricity crisis by using every option at their disposal to ensure there is enough power to meet demand in cooperation with local communities.The nation’s electric utilities have forecast their power supply capacity will exceed demand this winter. This is probably because they made efforts to increase supply from the

It was inevitable that the U.S. would eventually initiate some form of military cooperation with Myanmar, but few expected that it would come so early. Washington’s invitation for Nay Pyi Taw to join the annual Cobra Gold U.S.-Thai military exercise is a reward for Myanmar’s rapid process of reform. It also demonstrates just how desperate the U.S. is to make trade inroads into a country that has been isolated from the international community for the past five decades. Given that nearly all trade

The decision by the management behind Newsweek magazine to go all-digital by next year has been hailed or mourned ― depending on which side of the digital divide the observer is shouting from or looking at ― as the end of an era. For readers of a certain age, who got their fill of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal or tantalizing reports on the Marcos dictatorship from the magazine, it certainly felt that way.For several decades, especially when it was published by the Washington Post, Ne