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The Korea Times

The Korea Times

Opinion

Columnists

2. John Burton

Unfortunately, there is not much to celebrate in the New Year at least as far as Korea's economy is concerned. Most economists predict tough times ahead.

2023-01-09 16:50

Korea's semiconductor industry is at a crucial crossroads. It is under pressure from Washington to reduce sales to China and cooperate more closely with the U.S. in production and research. At the same time, it lags behind the tech developments of its main Taiwanese industrial rival, TSMC. All this is occurring as the demand for memory chips, in which Korea is the global leader, is weakening.

2022-12-12 16:28

An avoidable tragedy

Any tragedy has a more emotional impact if you are familiar with the place where it happened. As a result, I watched in horror a couple of weeks ago from my home in a Washington, D.C. suburb a CNN correspondent, standing in front of the Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon, reporting that many people had died from being crushed in a crowd as they celebrated Halloween.

2022-11-14 14:59

BTS will soon meet the army - not its legion of fans known as ARMY (Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth) but the actual military service. Can the world's biggest boyband survive that experience and retain its popularity when it returns to the stage, expected in 2025 at the earliest. Will BTS even exist then?

2022-10-31 13:46

A slap in the face

Cars have been at the center of trade disputes between Korea and the U.S. for more than 30 years. When Korean cars began making inroads into the U.S. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, U.S. auto manufacturers complained that both tariff and non-tariff barriers were keeping their products out of Korea. Although Seoul would make some concessions, the number of U.S. cars sold in Korea remained extremely low.

2022-10-17 14:32

Nuclear brinkmanship

North Korea's recent declaration that it would remain a nuclear state and that its decision was “irreversible” underscores the complete failure of U.S. policy toward Pyongyang over the last two decades.

2022-10-03 13:46

Learning English the Nordic way

Busan Mayor Park Heong-joon's ambition to turn his city into a center of English-speaking Koreans is a laudable one, but it will also be difficult to achieve, at least in the short term. No one doubts that English is the lingua franca of the global economy and its widespread use will help attract foreign investment to Busan and elsewhere in Korea.

2022-09-27 14:51

Korean populism

The hottest new trend in American newsrooms is coverage of threats to democracy, which has been sparked by the presidency of Donald Trump and its aftermath. Is Korea's hard-won democracy also threatened by troubling social trends?

2022-09-05 16:12

President Yoon Suk-yeol's efforts to restore the power of public prosecutors represents a key test for the future of Korea's democracy.

2022-08-22 16:20

Sleepwalking into war

Several years ago, Christopher Clark, a distinguished British historian, wrote a book called “The Sleepwalkers” about how Europe stumbled into World War I in the summer of 1914. He described how the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which was the trigger event for the war, was initially ignored by most of the international community. Britain was distracted by a political crisis and France was focused on a celebrity murder trial, for example.

2022-08-08 17:00

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