The European Union announced on the July 4 that it was to provide 10 million euros ($14.3 million) of emergency food aid to North Korea to be distributed through the World Food Program over the next three months ― until the end of September, just prior to the arrival of this year’s harvest. This aid represents a much delayed response to an initial request for humanitarian assistance sent by Foreig

The other day while walking on the campus of Seoul National University, I saw a big poster put up by the College of Humanities Student Association. The poster harshly criticized the incorporation plan of the university scheduled to be effective as of 2012, asserting that students do not want any radical change on campus.Then I found an amusingly contradictory signature at the bottom of the poster:

Park Chung-heeIt ain’t necessarily so. That’s what New York University economics professor William Easterly essentially says about crediting “benevolent autocrats” like South Korea’s Park Chung-hee for high growth rates.In “Benevolent Autocrats,” a provocative working paper posted in May, Easterly 1) argues that economists should be skeptical of the “benevolent autocrat” theory; (2) questions whet

MANILA ― One of the main sources of tension in Asia nowadays are the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea, where the Philippines, Vietnam, China, and others have conflicting claims. In Chinese media reports, the heightened “unfriendliness” in the region has allegedly arisen from “bad rumors and speculations” on the part of Filipino commentators. But the reality is starker: the intrusions by Chin

To watch Diane Sawyer’s recent interview with Jaycee Dugard was to wonder at times if that was Dugard herself on screen or an actress hired to play the role of the quintessential survivor. Dugard was so serene and lacking in rancor that it was hard to believe she had been kidnapped at age 11 and held prisoner for 18 years, during which she was repeatedly raped and bore two children, the first when

PRINCETON ― Mahatma Gandhi acutely observed that “the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated.” To seek to reduce the suffering of those who are completely under one’s domination, and unable to fight back, is truly a mark of a civilized society.Charting the progress of animal-welfare legislation around the world is therefore an indication of mo

WASHINGTON ― Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is a company with a chip on its shoulder. His defy-the-establishment sensibility has built a print and television empire, to the despair of more traditional (and, Murdoch would say, elitist) rivals. But the phone-hacking scandal that now envelops one of Murdoch’s British publications shows how corrosive this style of anything-goes journalism can be. It’s be

NEW DELHI ― U.S. President Barack Obama’s announcement of the start of American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan, and his administration’s increasing emphasis on reconciliation with the Taliban, have been studied attentively in one capital that has a large stake in the outcome ― New Delhi.India has no troops in Afghanistan, but it has invested roughly $1.5 billion to help reconstruct the country