It took less than a day for Finance Minister Hyun Oh-seok to come up with a revised tax reform plan after President Park Geun-hye sent the original version back to the drawing board.Park told officials Monday to start again from scratch as the ministry’s proposal triggered a massive outcry from middle-income taxpayers. The plan proposed to collect more taxes from workers with annual income of 34.5 million won or more.On Tuesday, Hyun briefed the leaders of the ruling Saenuri Party on the amended

The sweltering heat wave shows no signs of letting up, forcing the nation to continue its all-out struggle to avoid a major power shortage.For weeks, temperatures have remained at an unusually high level across the nation. In some areas, including Ulsan and Gimhae in South Gyeongsang Province, the mercury rose to 40 degrees Celsius, setting new highs. The relentless heat wave pushed electricity consumption to levels far exceeding those forecast by power authorities, threatening to cause serious

An odd puzzle is taking shape in the labor market: Over the past three years, the number of job openings has risen almost 50 percent, but actual hiring has gone up by less than 5 percent. Companies are advertising a lot more jobs, in other words, but not filling them. To get some sense of how significant this is, consider that if, since June 2010, hiring had risen a third as much as advertised jobs have (rather than only a 10th), and nothing else were different, job creation would be roughly 500

NEW YORK ― Afghanistan’s security and political situation remains plagued by uncertainty, stemming from the withdrawal of United States and NATO combat troops, the upcoming presidential election, and the stalled peace negotiations with the Taliban. Recognizing that continued economic insecurity will exacerbate this perilous situation, the government has announced a new package of economic incentives aimed at attracting foreign direct investment. The package includes the provision of land to indu

I used to live in Washington, D.C., and I worked at The Washington Post. Now I live near Seattle and work at The Seattle Times in a building just next door to Amazon.com’s sprawling complex.Those facts add up to just a few degrees of separation for the journalists and non-journalist friends curious about my thoughts about Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’ purchase of the Post.Sorry, but I have no insights beyond speculation. Bezos, a private guy anyway, is not walking around the South Lake Unio

Every year around this time, in the run-up to the Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945, feverish speculation ensues about whether Japan’s top politicians will visit the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo. Chinese and South Koreans ― not to mention many Japanese ― abhor such visits because the shrine honors the souls of 14 Class A war criminals. Visitors say they have every right to honor the 2.5 million other Japanese war dead celebrated at Yasukuni; they compare the shrine to the U.S.

LONDON ― Syria is a living nightmare. Egypt hovers on the brink. But, as the opening of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority shows, there are signs of hope. And, though it may seem counter-intuitive, the region’s turmoil is finally bringing to the surface its fundamental problems in a way that allows them to be confronted and overcome. Now is a time not for despair, but for active engagement.No one put the chances of reviving the Israel-Palestine peace process at more than mi

Forget Abenomics. Ignore Shinzo Abe’s efforts to rejuvenate Japan’s diplomatic and military clout. Look past the quest to rewrite the constitution. History will judge this prime minister by one thing alone: what he did, or didn’t do, to end the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl. It’s mind-boggling how disengaged Japan’s leaders have been since their “BP moment” ― the March 2011 near-meltdown at the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant. Abe’s predecessors Naoto Kan and Yoshihiko Noda virtually ign

The standoff between the ruling Saenuri Party and the main opposition Democratic Party is deepening as the government’s controversial tax reform proposal has provided fresh ammunition for the opposition party to attack the ruling camp.On Monday, the Democratic Party seized upon the unpopular tax plan to step up its assault on President Park Geun-hye. It kicked off a nationwide signature collection drive to thwart the reform plan, which was unveiled Thursday to levy more taxes on people in the mi

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has taken another step toward allowing Japan to exercise the right to collective self-defense, causing concern in Japan and neighboring countries. Abe recently appointed Ambassador to France Ichiro Komatsu to head the Cabinet Legislation Bureau, which advises Cabinet members on legal issues and examines the government’s legislative proposals. The appointment is widely seen as reflecting Abe’s intention to lift Japan’s self-imposed ban on engaging in collective

A full generation of Americans has come of age since the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union late in 1991. Those who lived that nearly half-century of tensions, with its threats of mutual nuclear destruction, tend to mistakenly recall a tidy geography: The West, chiefly the U.S. but also its NATO allies, poised decade after decade in readiness to combat the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies to the east.In truth the Cold War played out at random times, on multiple continents, among

Job growth is sputtering. So why aren’t the captains of American industry and finance ― the nation’s top CEOs, the titans of Wall Street, the corporate movers and shakers ― demanding that more be done to revive the economy? They have the political clout to make it happen.It can’t be they don’t know that job growth is sputtering. The data are indisputable. July’s job growth of 162,000 jobs was the weakest in four months. The average workweek was the shortest in six months. The Bureau of Labor Sta

At their White House meeting last week, U.S. President Barack Obama assured Greek Prime Minister Antonis Samaras of his support as Greece prepares for talks with creditors on additional debt relief amid record-high unemployment. The U.S. should also endorse a new blueprint for recovery based on one of the most successful economic assistance programs of the modern era: the Marshall Plan. It is clear by now that the European Union’s policies in Greece have failed. Projections that government spend

So, the White House announces the emergence of a “significant” terrorist threat; the State Department issues a worldwide travel alert and shuts down 21 diplomatic missions; the Pentagon places U.S. forces throughout the Middle East on heightened alert, and the president of the United States ... books a gig on “Tonight.”The decision to chat up Jay Leno seemed a bit incongruous at first, but on second thought, it wasn’t a bad idea at all. The late-night talk show gave the president a chance to exp

NEW YORK ― With leadership transitions at many central banks either under way or coming soon, many of those who were partly responsible for creating the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 ― before taking strong action to prevent the worst ― are departing to mixed reviews. The main question now is the extent to which those reviews will influence their successors’ behavior.Many financial-market players are grateful for the regulatory laxity that allowed them to reap enormous profits befor

MELBOURNE, Australia ― Earlier this year, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time there was that much CO2 in our atmosphere was three million years ago, when sea levels were 24 meters higher than they are today. Now sea levels are rising again. Last September, Arctic sea ice covered the smallest area ever recorded. All but one of the ten warmest years since 1880, when global records began to be kept, have occurred in the twenty-fir

My father used to say that there are two kinds of people in the world: those who do what they say they are going to do, and everybody else. I thought of that maxim when I heard that the Graham family was selling the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, the chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc. When Amazon went public in 1997, Bezos was the frontman, evangelizing his vision of not only the world’s biggest bookstore but also the world’s dominant retailer. This, from the CEO of a company that was lo

Major media outlets have featured him as representative of a new generation of “patriot hackers.” He sent an old laptop to the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., where it’s now on display. He claims to have launched hacking attacks on websites ranging from jihadist forums to WikiLeaks. Last week, a guest on the syndicated radio program “Coast to Coast AM” described the individual hiding behind “The Jester” moniker (or “th3j35t3r” in hacker lingo) as “not somebody in someone’s basement

President Barack Obama keeps declaring war on rising college costs. In a speech at Knox College last month, he vowed to unveil an “aggressive strategy to shake up the system, tackle rising costs and improve value.” He said something similar in his 2012 State of the Union address, so I’m a little skeptical that much will happen. As students get ready to go to college this month, let me suggest ways to “shake up the system” and “tackle rising costs.” In doing so, I would point out that two things

The French sociologist Luc Boltanski has argued that conspiracy theories and general public suspicion toward the state apparatus tend to thrive in bureaucratic societies where the information gap between those in power and those without increases. Now, since WikiLeaks set in motion a series of spectacular cases revealing the nature and extent of covert government operations, it would seem that the word “suspicion” hardly makes sense anymore, at least not in the way it used to. For with the acces