The Korea Herald

[The Baltimore Sun] Trump’s Russian reversal

President Donald Trump’s inconsistency may be his only consistency, but even by the standard he’s set for abrupt reversals during his first five months in office, the president’s recent proclamations on election meddling raise hypocrisy to nose-bleed heights. Lest we bury the lead, here’s the real upshot: for the first time, Trump has acknowledged Russian interference in the last election and is none too happy about it.What could have motivated the nation’s commander in chief to finally admit to

June 29, 2017

[Other view] India as ally: US ties with Modi make good balance with China

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Washington and met with President Donald Trump on Monday. It is easy to see why the president is paying attention to this Indian leader. He is clearly in the same league of world leaders as China’s Xi Jinping; Russia’s Vladimir Putin, whom Trump has not yet met with as president; Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan; and Germany’s Angela Merkel.Indian-American economic and commercial involvement is plain to see, although Trump’s emphasis on trying to sell Ind

June 29, 2017

[Andrew Sheng] May into June

April is the cruelest month, so said poet TS Eliot. But one wit remarked that June marks the end of May. Who would have expected that British Prime Minister Theresa May would lose her majority in Parliament in the June election, which was supposed to strengthen her hand in negotiating Brexit with the European Union? This expectation reversal was as big a shock as Brexit or Trumpism. May may have found her Ides of March in June. In sharp contrast, unlike earlier in the year when everyone was worr

June 28, 2017

[Other view] NATO can fight terrorism and help refugees

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization has now formally enlisted in the fight against the Islamic State group. It can begin by helping to stem the flow of refugees trying to reach Europe from North Africa.This would be more than a humanitarian exercise; it would be a counterterrorism operation. Wherever refugees gather in hopelessness, violent extremists have a fertile recruiting ground. And the number of refugees is staggering.Nearly 200,000 people fleeing violence and poverty tried to cross th

June 28, 2017

[Mihir Sharma] Tax reform looks like an Indian wedding

India stands on the brink of one of its most momentous policy reforms in decades unprepared and uncertain. We’re just a few days away from the launch of a new indirect-tax regime, the goods-and-services tax, or GST, and anxiety about its rollout is all-pervasive.The reform, which intends to knit India together into a single tax area for the first time, goes live on July 1 -- in fact, at the stroke of midnight. The Narendra Modi-led central government, always on the lookout for a bit of spectacle

June 28, 2017

[Leonid Bershidsky] Macron can follow Germany’s lead on labor reform

The German economy is in a remarkably rosy phase. According to data published Monday by the Ifo Institute, business confidence is at a record high since 1991. The Bundesbank has raised its growth forecasts through 2019. One of the reasons for this surge of optimism is that the German labor market is performing well. At 3.9 percent, the unemployment rate is lower than it has been since the country’s reunification.It‘s often said that to achieve the same kind of economic buoyancy, France needs to

June 28, 2017

[Leonid Bershidsky] Macron can follow Germany’s lead on labor reform

[Joel Kotkin] Want to be green? Work at home

Expanding mass transit systems is a pillar of green and “new urbanist” thinking, but with few exceptions, the idea of ever-larger numbers of people commuting into an urban core ignores a major shift in the labor economy: More people are working from home.True, in a handful of large metropolitan regions — what we might call “legacy cities” — trains and buses remain essential. This is particularly true of New York, which accounts for a remarkable 43 percent of the US’ mass transit commuters, and o

June 28, 2017

[Joel Kotkin] Want to be green? Work at home

[The Baltimore Sun] The Supreme Court’s uneasy compromise on Trump’s travel ban

President Donald Trump called the Supreme Court’s decision to hear cases related to his ban on travel from six Muslim nations and to allow it to go into partial effect in the meantime “a clear victory.” But there’s nothing clear about it, either for his administration or for those who could be affected by it. Rather, it is reminiscent of other baby-splitting decisions by the Roberts court in politically tricky cases, and it is difficult to see what it portends either in the weeks ahead or after

June 28, 2017

[Kim Seong-kon] Would you fight change and be left behind?

This is the National Assembly Hearing season in Korea for Cabinet minister-designates proposed by the new administration. Every day, newspaper reporters thoroughly examine every nook and cranny of the candidate’s past life to find skeletons in his or her closet. Meanwhile, the readers enjoy watching a prominent personality publicly humiliated and feel catharsis as he or she desperately struggles in the quagmire and hopelessly sinks into the pit. Of course, it is necessary to screen our future mi

June 27, 2017

[Kim Seong-kon] Would you fight change and be left behind?

[Tyler Cowen] Populism’s success, in plain English

Populist and “alt-right” causes have lately seen some setbacks, including the centrist electoral results in the Netherlands, the victory of Emmanuel Macron and his party in France, the poor showing of the Five Star Movement in local Italian elections and the split of the True Finns party in Finland. Yet the US election of Donald Trump and the vote for Brexit remain, at least so far, and so a new question arises: Are these political movements primarily an Anglo-American phenomenon, and if so why?

June 27, 2017

[Leonid Bershidsky] Macron can follow Germany’s lead on labor reform

The German economy is in a remarkably rosy phase. According to data published on Monday by the Ifo Institute, business confidence is at a record high since 1991. The Bundesbank has raised its growth forecasts through 2019. One of the reasons for this surge of optimism is that the German labor market is performing well. At 3.9 percent, the unemployment rate is lower than it has been since the country’s reunification.It‘s often said that to achieve the same kind of economic buoyancy, France needs

June 27, 2017

[Trudy Rubin] Trump’s failing ‘big man doctrine’

King Salman of Saudi Arabia just elevated his somewhat reckless 31-year-old son Prince Mohammed to become crown prince, and the White House is thrilled.The prince has bonded with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, hosting him and Ivanka Trump for dinner at his home when the pair traveled with the president to Saudi Arabia. The closeness of these two “princes” syncs perfectly with the emerging Trump doctrine of foreign policy.Call it the “big man doctrine.”Based on his performance over five months

June 27, 2017

[Lee Jae-min] Money is fungible

As a professor teaching international law I receive questions from people from time to time asking me whether UN Security Council resolutions are binding, that is whether they are ‘legally’ binding. The answer to that question is yes. I figure that those questions and perhaps the misperception of UNSC resolutions partly come from the title itself – “resolution.” In fact, many a resolution adopted domestically or internationally is not legally binding (unlike statutes or treaties), albeit politic

June 27, 2017

[Other view] Congress should pass new sanctions on Russia as meddling evidence grows

The Senate recently approved what would be a serious and needed check on the presidency. The bill would prevent President Donald Trump from easing sanctions without congressional review. It also would impose broad new penalties at key Russian economic sectors — punishment for blatant interference in the 2016 election.Final passage is even more vital given the revelation in a Washington Post story that such interference came at the direct order of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose specific

June 27, 2017

[Trudy Rubin] US student’s death should shine light on North Korea’s rights abuses

Anyone with human feelings is outraged by North Korea’s murder of Otto Warmbier.The term “murder” is justified, although we don’t know exactly how this bright, adventurous student was brutalized after his arrest on a tourist visit to North Korea. No other word describes the crime of sentencing Otto to 15 years of hard labor for allegedly stealing a propaganda poster, then holding him for more than a year while he lay in a coma — and cutting off any diplomatic access to him.Yet note that, unlike

June 26, 2017

[Trudy Rubin] US student’s death should shine light on North Korea’s rights abuses

[Virginia Heffernan] Ten years later, the iPhone owns us

Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in January, 2007, before an adoring congregation, in his signature “Sermon on the Mount” style. On June 29, it became available to the public. Ten years later, the phone has spread like Christianity. The device represents “the pinnacle product of all capitalism,” as Brian Merchant argues in his new book, “The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone.” Merchant calls the adoption of the iPhone a “rapid, civilization-scale transformation.”Happy birthday, iP

June 26, 2017

[Virginia Heffernan] Ten years later, the iPhone owns us

[Steven Rosenbaum] The real side of fake news

Today’s digital devices and social networks deliver so much information that even the savviest consumer cannot evaluate all of it. We seem to be living in a version of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where truth is drowned in a sea of irrelevance. But the future need not be the dystopia that the present seems to suggest.The share of Americans who get their news from social media has grown rapidly in recent years, to 62 percent as of 2016. And yet, according to a recent study by the Pew Research

June 26, 2017

[Virginia Postrel] Immigrants make America great. So do their grandchildren

Here’s a helpful hint for my fellow immigration enthusiasts: stop dissing Americans whose ancestors got here before yours.It’s a common trope: “Immigrants make America great.” You can buy a T-shirt that says it. It sounds like a happy celebration of Americans by choice. But it quickly becomes a way to disparage Americans by birth.Take the recent New York Times column by Bret Stephens titled “Only Mass Deportation Can Save America.” An attempt at Swiftian satire, it was a divisive exercise in ide

June 26, 2017

[Gloria Johns] An open letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin

Dear President Putin:There is no doubt that you control American politics and, in fact, you are now in control of the White House and the present and future state of democracy in the United States. That you have done this without firing a shot or shedding one ounce of blood of your kinsmen or ours proves that you deserve a place of highest notoriety on the world stage. Your achievement in bringing the most powerful nation to heel means that you, at least for a time, have assumed the role of the

June 26, 2017

[Other view] N. Korea no place for US tourists

It‘s easier for American tourists to travel to North Korea than to Cuba. It’s also more dangerous, as the death of college student Otto Warmbier after 17 months of North Korean captivity shows.But never mind the absurdity of President Donald Trump’s reimposition of travel restrictions to a relatively open and safe island 145 kilometers off the American coast. To prevent future deaths and protect US national security, the US Congress should ban US tourist travel to Kim Jong-un’s reclusive police

June 26, 2017