Ironically, it was Pascal Lamy, director-general of the World Trade Organization in Geneva, who made a case for the importance of prompt ratification and implementation of Korea’s free trade agreements with the European Union and the United States. At the Trade Negotiation Committee meeting last Friday, the WTO chief officially acknowledged that the Doha negotiation is now “on the brink of failure

One of the most important tasks for a diplomat is to settle disputes and resolve conflicts through negotiations. But what if he himself should cause a dispute or a conflict, as a former ambassador to an African country may have done?The case in point involved the ambassador who recently returned home after his assignment in the Ivory Coast. Among the items he brought with him from the African coun

The nation’s holdings of foreign currency surpassed the $300 billion mark at the end of April. Should the nation confront any financial crisis in the future, these bulging state coffers will be of great help in cushioning the blow.To hold $300 billion in foreign reserves is nothing short of a sea change for a nation that has been exposed to the threat of sovereign bankruptcy on two occasions durin

You’ve no doubt been hearing the harrowing warnings about what might happen if Congress refuses to lift the federal government’s debt ceiling, as some conservative Republicans have threatened.If the federal government gets anywhere near defaulting on its debts, President Obama warned this month, that “could plunge the world economy back into recession.”Even House Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, O

Pop quiz: Who is Fred Karger?I doubt you’d know. Sounds like a guy who’d sell you Sheetrock or life insurance.And yet, the folks who run the South Carolina Republican Party are very interested in Fred Karger ― so interested, in fact, that they want him on stage on Thursday as a presidential candidate in the first Republican debate of the 2012 campaign, slated for airing on Fox News. They’ve invite

WASHINGTON ― The assault on Osama bin Laden ― as quick and ruthless an operation as you would see in any spy movie ― shows that the CIA and the military’s super-secret Joint Special Operations Command have combined to create what amounts to a highly effective killing machine. The shorthand for these operations is “find, fix, finish.” The CIA and other intelligence agencies typically provide the fi

The Seoul Subway Union’s exit last week from the “Minju Nochong,” a radical national umbrella union, and its leaders’ move to form a third national union herald drastic changes in the nation’s labor movement. Up to now, labor activities have long been competitively swayed by the two national bodies: Minju Nochong (the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions) and Hanguk Nochong (the Federation of Kore

As it came after months of pro-democracy upheavals in the Muslim world this year, the news of the death of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid on his hideout in Pakistan allows a faint but positive outlook for an end to a decade of intercultural conflicts started by the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Yet, whoever shares this somewhat wishful thinking should be wary of retaliation by al-Qaida militants for the “

Last week, I flew to Los Angeles to chair an international conference at the University of Southern California. When I landed at L.A. airport, I found more than 200 international passengers lined up at immigration to receive an entry stamp. Unfortunately, there were only six officers processing the seemingly endless, serpentine lines. Worse, they were doing their job in a leisurely manner without

NATO’s bombing of Tripoli on Saturday, which reportedly killed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s son and three grandchildren definitely went beyond the U.N. Security Council mandate. However the alliance may try to stretch the mission given under UNSC resolution 1973 on Libya, which was to establish a no-fly zone over the country to protect civilians from military attacks, NATO commanders cannot jus

Guryong Village in the Gangnam district of Seoul represents some of the absurdities in present-day Korea. Many of the people who live in about 1,200 shacks at Guryong Village, located near the plush Tower Palace high-rise block, moved in from other parts of Seoul when they were evicted by city authorities for redevelopment projects in the 1980s. The urban migrants settled at the foot of Guryong Hi

The Emperor and Empress, who have been visiting evacuees from areas hit by the Great East Japan Earthquake, visited quake-hit Miyagi Prefecture on Wednesday.It was the Imperial couple’s first visit the Tohoku region since the March 11 quake. They are also scheduled to visit Iwate and Fukushima prefectures shortly.Their words must be a great encouragement to people in or from the quake-hit areas, e

“Command influence is the mortal enemy of military justice.”Robinson O. Everett, former chief judge of what is now the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces, wrote those powerful words in 1986. They underscore the importance of banning the power inherent in command from military courtrooms. Congress wrote such a ban into the Uniform Code of Military Justice more than 60 year ago, recognizing that

President Obama must soon make a critical decision: how many and what type of U.S. forces to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan this summer. The July withdrawal date is an artificial deadline, one the president created not because it would help us reach our goals in this strategically critical country but for his own domestic political purposes. When Obama made the promise in 2009, at the same tim

Negotiations will reportedly start on a Korean-Chinese free trade agreement in the near future, possibly as early as in June. A senior Blue House official is quoted as saying that Korea and China will hold a summit this month and declare the launch of negotiations next month.As the official said, China has a strong desire to conclude negotiations on a free trade deal with Korea. But Korea has not

A dictionary definition of “new town” is a “planned urban community designed for self-sufficiency and providing educational, commercial and recreational facilities for its residents.” As such, it differs from “settlements that evolve in more ad hoc fashion.”Britain began to build new communities under the New Towns Act of 1946. Many other countries, borrowing from Britain, have since launched simi

WASHINGTON ― Think of Pakistan for a moment as the equivalent of Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. Both countries have strong militaries and weak civilian governments. Both are nominally America’s partners in the war against al-Qaida, but both chafe at U.S. pressure. In each nation, the street is buzzing with talk of the nation’s shame and humiliation under American hegemony. In Egypt, this pressure cooker l

I admit it: I love Kate Middleton. I love that she defied the usual dating advice and waited years for her prince to come around. I love that she’s a commoner but still wears those outrageous feathered hats. Most of all, I love that the hats are the most remarkable thing about her.Pretty without being distractingly gorgeous, fashionable without pushing boundaries, reserved without being shy, Cathe

SEOUL ― As China continues its unremitting rise, people throughout East Asia are wondering whether their states will ever be able to achieve the peaceful, stable relations that now characterize Europe. Given the regularity of serious diplomatic spats ― over everything from tiny atolls in the South China Sea to the legacy of World War II ― this may sound like an elusive dream. But, with nationalism

Despite the rants of some conservative politicians and fringe scientists, it’s a fact that greenhouse gases produced by human activity contribute to global warming. Last week the Supreme Court considered one way that such emissions might be controlled: through a huge and unwieldy lawsuit brought by California and five other states against five power companies and the Tennessee Valley Authority. Se