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

One of the positive changes during the past couple of years is that Korean laws and regulations have become more available in English. This is an important development for foreign businessmen and investors who are currently in Korea or are considering coming to Korea. Just a while back, laws and regulations were only sporadically available in some specific areas. The Ministry of Government Legisla

During my 2010 holiday in Turkey, I brought only one book to read ― George Friedman’s “The Next 100 Years.” Friedman is an American political scientist and founder of the private intelligence company Stratfor. I first came across him through browsing in the Internet and found his analysis of political events uniquely penetrating and bold. For someone to forecast the next century showed an audacity

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

These days, the newly-coined term, “Gangnam left wing,” is quite fashionable in Korea. The term, which refers to leftist activists who reside in the rich district of South Seoul, is similar to the pejorative American term, “limousine leftists.” The British sarcastically call such people “chardonnay socialists” or “Champagne socialists,” and the French call them “caviar leftists.” In the Netherland

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

WASHINGTON ― The day before he suffered a fatal tear in his heart last December, a frustrated Richard Holbrooke confided to a colleague: The Obama administration had tried everything to convince Pakistan to crack down on terrorism, including threats and special-assistance packages, but none of it seemed to work. Why wasn’t Pakistan getting the message? The question posed by Holbrooke in his final

When I first heard that Newt Gingrich was mapping a Republican presidential bid ― he formally announced Wednesday ― I recalled what conservative Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., said recently about the guy. It sure wasn’t pretty.Coburn was a Newt soldier back in the 1990s, when Newt was riding high as House speaker and conservative Pied Piper. Nevertheless, Coburn told C-SPAN in March that “having served

LONDON ― Osama bin Laden’s death in his Pakistani hiding place is like the removal of a tumor from the Muslim world. But aggressive follow-up therapy will be required to prevent the remaining al-Qaida cells from metastasizing by acquiring more adherents who believe in violence to achieve the “purification” and empowerment of Islam.Fortunately, bin Laden’s death comes at the very moment when much o

On Monday 50 years ago, a group of Army officers, led by Maj. Gen. Park Chung-hee, toppled the government and took power in a coup. Park ruled the nation for the next 18 years ― first as the coup leader and later as an authoritarian president ― before being assassinated by his intelligence chief.The anniversary is certain to rekindle a debate on the event’s historical meaning. The government ouste

If congressional negotiators fail to resolve their impasse over the federal debt ceiling, we may recall this moment in history as one of the nation’s worst since the morning Custer awoke thinking it might be amusing to go and annoy Sitting Bull.Ensuring the U.S. government’s full faith and credit is a matter of such consequence to the global financial system that everything else concerning the bud

The Monetary Policy Committee is holding its monthly meeting Friday to determine whether or not to keep the central bank’s benchmark rate intact. Among the things that must be taken into consideration is the real interest rate, which has remained below zero for the past five months.A key real rate, the nominal yield on three-year government bonds less the consumer price index, was minus 0.5 percen