The Korea Herald

[Jay Ambrose] Will Trump surprise us with North Korea?

President Donald Trump is full of surprises -- major surprises, such as getting elected in the first place. Can he now deliver the biggest surprise of all by getting North Korea to give up its nuclear arsenal, something that just might save the world from annihilation?　Probably not, many observers say. They agree it would be hallelujah time if he pulled something like that off in a summit meeting with Kim Jong-un, supreme leader of the socialist slave state. But Kim and his family have spent mur

April 26, 2018

[Kim Myong-sik] Internet leviathan serves as hotbed for political virus

Living in the 21st century we owe a lot to the geniuses and entrepreneurs who have played a part in the development of the computer technology and mobile communications. Everyone breathing in the contemporary world saves a lot of time, energy and money in obtaining information and data that he or she needs for everyday life -- far more than actually needed.　Our family is well familiar with the time-worn story of the young father spending agonizing weeks waiting for a letter from his wife after w

April 25, 2018

[Kim Myong-sik] Internet leviathan serves as hotbed for political virus

[The Chicago Tribune] Trump is taking smart, calculated risk with North Korea talks

In July 1971, President Richard Nixon jolted the international status quo -- and set diplomatic nerves worldwide fluttering -- by announcing he would visit China. “Never in history, to our knowledge, have diplomatic relations progressed so fast from the Ping-Pong table to the Presidency,” this page breathlessly observed.　Nixon’s bold overture reshaped the modern world and has paid vast dividends to Washington, to Beijing and to the general stability of global geopolitics.　Now another potentially

April 25, 2018

[Andrew Wolman] Human rights and North Korea talks

Human rights activists can be forgiven if they show less than complete enthusiasm for the upcoming summit meetings between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and his South Korean and American counterparts. It is not just the distinct possibility of failure that they fear, although there is that. There is also the prospect that even if the talks succeed in lowering peninsular tensions or -- in a best-case scenario -- bringing a peace treaty and denuclearization, they will do so at the cost of legiti

April 25, 2018

[Elizabeth Rosenberg, Neil Bhatiya] Don’t let up on North Korea now

The administration of US President Donald Trump may or may not be right in thinking that its “maximum pressure” campaign has brought North Korea to the bargaining table. What’s certain is that there remain cracks in that campaign. To sustain pressure on the Pyongyang regime and give the US leverage in upcoming talks between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, they need to be plugged.　Certainly, the Trump administration deserves credit for coordinating the harshest set of sanctions ever le

April 25, 2018

[Elizabeth Rosenberg, Neil Bhatiya] Don’t let up on North Korea now

[Ana Palacio] Macron’s vital message

When Emmanuel Macron was elected president of France last year, he was presented as a kind of European savior, a wunderkind who had burst onto the French political scene just in the nick of time. Now, many are asking, with a combination of schadenfreude and defeatism, whether Macron’s star burned too bright -- and so is destined to burn out fast. But this focus on Macron’s record so far threatens to overshadow his crucial message about the future of European democracy.Macron won the French presi

April 25, 2018

[Kang So-young] Big changes lie ahead for media industry

The conventional TV era is expected to come to an end. Trends have changed to TV-centered content received via set-top boxes, such as cable TV and internet-based online video-streaming contents. The impact from the emergence of “Over the Top” services, resulting from the swift development of information and communication technology, has spelled the end for the conventional TV age. Even the number of households with no TV has been increasing.The top issue in the cutting-edge media industry is now

April 25, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Cultural differences: enlightening and embarrassing

Cultural differences are always intriguing and fascinating. Of course, as humans we all tend to feel similar emotions in similar situations. Nevertheless, we often perceive things differently due to cultural differences. That is why cultural understanding is crucial in this rapidly globalizing world. Sometime, even professors learn from their students due to cultural differences. When I taught at Brigham Young University two decades ago, I assigned the Korean short story “Kapitan Lee” to my Amer

April 24, 2018

[Kim Seong-kon] Cultural differences: enlightening and embarrassing

[Hal Brands] Congress again punts on Trump’s war powers

Something odd is happening in the relationship between Congress and the executive branch regarding the use of military force. For decades, or even longer, countless senators and representatives have complained that presidents are not properly respectful of their constitutional prerogatives in making decisions on employing US military power. And today, most Democrats and a number of Republicans seem to agree that President Donald Trump is an impulsive, erratic, even dangerous commander-in-chief.　

April 24, 2018

[Robert J. Fouser] Managing expectations for the upcoming summits

This Friday President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un will meet for the first time. Expectations are running high that the summit will start a process that leads to peace and eventual reunification of the divided people. These high expectations come after years of tension that escalated sharply in 2017 after a series of North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile tests. Expectations are also running high that the proposed meeting between Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump w

April 24, 2018

[Robert J. Fouser] Managing expectations for the upcoming summits

[Justin Fendos] Dealing with Trump is only a first step

The year is 1994. The United States and North Korea have just signed an agreement finalizing terms for denuclearization. No, this is not a piece of science fiction; it is something that actually happened. And yet, for some reason, North Korea remains today in possession of nuclear weapons. So what went wrong?First, let’s recount what happened in 1993. That year, as a member of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), North Korea hosted inspectors from the International Atomi

April 24, 2018

[Therese Raphael] Wenger wasn’t just a soccer coach

The leader of what was once considered one of the best-managed soccer clubs in the world stepped down Friday and the Twittersphere erupted in two opposite directions: jubilation and sadness.　Half of English football fans seem to regard the departure from the Arsenal Football Club of 68-year-old Arsene Wenger as coming years too late. The other half rues the brutality of a changing industry that turned his virtues into handicaps. Wenger was enormously successful and his club was nicely profitable

April 24, 2018

[The Nation] What happened to America ‘for the people’?

Police around the world are supposedly there “to serve and protect,” and yet we see the current showdown between a former chief of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and President Donald Trump sinking America’s already shaky democracy further into jeopardy. Elected leaders are of course mandated to assemble their own teams of specialists on agriculture, finance, public welfare and the like, but the police represent a different kind of institution, assigned a singular task, and that is ensuri

April 23, 2018

[Barry Ritholtz] Billionaire Bezos and warehouse workers

We have just learned that the median salary of employees at Amazon.com is $28,446, excluding its chief executive officer and founder, Jeff Bezos. That pitiful number raises an intriguing question: Is Amazon a high-paying tech company or a low-wage retailer?“Both” is the obvious answer, but to this Amazon aficionado that answer is incomplete.The pay figure, which was disclosed for the first time in Amazon’s annual proxy statement, reflects the large number of low-paid retail and warehouse employe

April 23, 2018

[Barry Ritholtz] Billionaire Bezos and warehouse workers

[Slawomir Sierakowski] Germany’s populist temptation

Because populism is not an ideology in itself, it can easily appeal to mainstream political parties seeking to shore up flagging electoral support. There are always politicians willing to mimic populist slogans and methods to win over voters, even if doing so divides their own party. This has been proven by Republicans in the United States, Conservatives and Labourites in the United Kingdom, and Les Republicains under the new leadership of Laurent Wauquiez in France.But the most ominous manifest

April 23, 2018

[Slawomir Sierakowski] Germany’s populist temptation

[Bloomberg] Cuba after the Castros

When Cuba’s President Raul Castro hands over power, the change will be more symbolic than substantive. The 86-year-old Castro will remain party leader until 2021 -- and his handpicked successor, Miguel Diaz-Canel, wasn’t chosen for his determination to dismantle Cuba’s police state or abandon its socialist economic system. Nonetheless, the end of the Castros’ era is an opportunity for change, and Diaz-Canel has every reason to try to seize it.Cuba’s economy is in a truly dismal state. After year

April 23, 2018

[Bandy X. Lee] Peace or war on Korean Peninsula?

One of the most critical roles of a president is to negotiate terms of peace and war. The fate of a nation, or even the world, could hang in the balance; a misstep could plunge humanity into a worldwide war, but the right step could bring about long-awaited peace. A sudden and intense interest in the American president since his agreement to a US-North Korea summit took me to South Korea as editor of the book “The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.” More than two dozen top mental health professiona

April 23, 2018

[Matthew Winkler] Trade wars don’t faze this US-China investor

The steadfast stock market of 2017 turned into a roller coaster this year by the time President Donald Trump tweeted, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” The rhetoric directed at China soon became Trump tariffs on imported aluminum and steel. China responded with duties on 128 products. Daily price fluctuations of publicly traded companies caught in the US-China crossfire are

April 22, 2018

[Matthew Winkler] Trade wars don’t faze this US-China investor

[David Ignatius] Space: the new frontier of warfare

Sitting at the controls of a Boeing space-flight simulator, “docking” the company’s planned “Starliner” craft with an imaginary space station, you begin to understand why the Pentagon is so focused on such advanced systems. Space is the new frontier of warfare. That was the theme of a “Space Symposium” here this week that gathered thousands of military and corporate experts from around the globe. A version of the Boeing simulator may someday be training the 21st-century version of fighter pilots

April 22, 2018

[David Ignatius] Space: the new frontier of warfare

[Eli Lake] Trump is not Nixon and North Korea is not China

If you Google “Trump,” “Nixon” and “China,” you will find billions of pixels devoted to comparing the 37th president’s breakthrough with Beijing to the potential summit between Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un.　 The parallel is understandable. It took a committed anti-communist to open relations with Communist China. Perhaps it will take a president who threatened “fire and fury” to open ties to the leader he called “little rocket man.” In 1972 when Mao Zedong hosted President Richard Nixon in Beiji

April 22, 2018