Californians cannot expect state parks, as beloved as they are, to be spared from the budget ax. Not when the elderly are going without home health aides and schools are pink-slipping thousands of teachers. Whether it’s practical to close 70 of the state’s parks, as Gov. Jerry Brown proposes, is another matter.The state Department of Parks and Recreation has done a thoughtful job of targeting park

On Monday, the National Tax Service summoned senior officials and regional office heads to a conference at short notice. That was unusual. The usual practice is to hold such a conference annually, at the outset of each year.Even odder was that there was no urgent issue to deal with. Instead, what the participants were told was to refrain from arranging jobs for their retiring colleagues because it

In recent consultations with small and medium-sized businesses, President Lee Myung-bak said the chaebol owner-centered style of management needs to be changed. He stopped short of specifying details of how to do so, but said they should alter their management style to favor co-prosperity with SMEs.But it takes no genius to guess what message Lee wanted to get across to the business tycoons contro

Forty-three former Navy and Air Force heads collectively turned down an invitation to a Defense Ministry briefing Tuesday on an extensive defense reform plan. They were particularly dissatisfied with the proposed system to place the chief of naval operations and the Air Force chief of staff under the operational control of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.Many retired Army generals are al

It is fortunate that National Police Agency chief Cho Hyun-oh officially withdrew a controversial plan to change the traffic signal system by introducing red arrow for “no left turn.” “Global standards” were cited for the change, which the police asserted was conducive to reducing traffic accidents. It took two years for the NPA to prepare for the change after the National Competitiveness Commissi

No matter how well we foresee and plan, some aspects of both man-made and natural risks will remain random and unpredictable. This uncertainty is inherent in the very nature of risk, and its chaotic and fickle nature has been reaffirmed by the recent tragedies in Japan. As the Japanese people and their government gradually shift from responding to the immediate safety and humanitarian aftermath of

President Obama spoke last week about the economic reasons for providing a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s undocumented. This is clearly a polarizing issue, and there is much room for honest disagreement. But there’s one fact we can’t ignore: Undocumented immigrants in the U.S. include the parents of 4.5 million children who are legal citizens. What that means is that, on average, one or t

Balanced regional development has been a key objective in national administration for decades. But each time the government makes a decision on the location of any major state project, competition among candidate cities and provinces become so severe that it looks like the nation is just falling apart.As the central city of Daejeon has been selected as the location for a “science-business belt,” a

An individual’s sexual misdeeds have never caused a greater shock and disappointment in living memory than the alleged sexual assault attributed to Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the French managing director of the International Monetary Fund who is under arrest in New York after a hotel maid reported to police a case of attempted rape Sunday. Bill Clinton managed to survive the Monica Lewinsky scandal w

During the Golden Week holidays from April 28 to May 8, a total of some 78,000 volunteers worked in Iwate, Miyagi and Fukushima prefectures, which were devastated by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami, according to “disaster volunteer centers” set up by local governments in the prefectures.On and after May 9, however, that number dropped sharply. On a peak day, there were some 11,000 volunteers,

The world shared the American people’s gratitude for the special forces who rid us of Osama bin Laden, but there was one flagrant exception.“We condemn the assassination of an Arab holy warrior,” declared Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the Hamas regime in Gaza, who also deplored “the continuing American policy ... of shedding Muslim blood.”This is the same Hamas that has launched hundreds o