When I was a boy and lost just about every sporting event I tried, my father told me, “What counts isn’t whether you win or lose but how you play the game.”Most parents told their kids this. It was part of the American creed. But I doubt Fred Trump passed on the same advice to little Donald, who seems to have learned the exact opposite: It’s not how you play the game but whether you win or lose.If there’s one idea that summarizes Donald Trump -- his character, temperament, career, business strat

Viewpoints June 14, 2016

Even by Donald Trump’s standards, his comments about the Orlando shooting have been reckless and self-serving. They are also dangerous for the country.Trump‘s response to Sunday morning’s terrorist attack by Omar Mateen was initially an opportunistic tweet; then a boasting statement on his website: “I said this was going to happen”; followed by a renewed call to temporarily ban Muslim immigration; and capped by a sinister insinuation Monday morning that President Obama should resign after the sh

Viewpoints June 14, 2016

Unloved and underappreciated, America’s nuclear reactors supply almost two-thirds of the country’s low-carbon energy -- reliably and without harm to human health or the earth’s atmosphere. Nuclear is the biggest, sturdiest force against climate change there is.It is also threatened by market forces and short-sighted public policy. If energy costs accurately reflected the price of carbon, nuclear would be competitive. They don’t, and it isn’t, but there are other ways governments can make the ene

Viewpoints June 14, 2016

If past is prelude, then the massacre in Orlando this weekend will benefit Donald Trump’s campaign for the presidency. As the presumptive Republican presidential nominee has boasted, he gained significant support in December when a husband-and-wife jihadist duo shot up a government building in San Bernardino, California.Now Trump is crowing. His tweets and interviews since the shooting are a series of told-ya-so’s. He is quite pleased with himself for observing that President Barack Obama doesn’

Viewpoints June 14, 2016

The ruling Saenuri Party launched a reform committee on June 2, but the panel, which also acts as the party’s interim leadership until a new leader is elected, has not yet proposed any major reform agenda.The committee is led by Kim Hee-ok, a former head of the Government Public Ethics Committee. When Kim was tapped for the party’s interim leadership, many wondered how the former Supreme Court justice with no political experience would reform the conservative party, which is riddled with faction

Editorial June 13, 2016

Lotte Group, Korea’s fifth-largest conglomerate, is facing an investigation into allegations that its chairman and other top executives embezzled corporate money to create slush funds.Some 200 investigators raided Friday the group’s headquarters and six major affiliates to seize hard disk drives and accounting books. They also searched the homes and offices of the group chairman, Shin Dong-bin, and other key officials.Prosecutors are focusing on asset deals among Lotte subsidiaries, suspecting t

Editorial June 13, 2016

China‘s Xi Jinping recently declared that he wants China to rank as one of the world’s most innovative countries by 2020 and to top the list by mid-century. Going by past practice, this probably means a lot more money being poured into dodgy start-ups and ill-conceived high-tech schemes. There’s a better model to be found, however, one that’s surprisingly close to home: the southern boomtown of Shenzhen.　The city‘s Nanshan district, home to a huge High-Tech Industrial Park, is now China’s riches

Viewpoints June 13, 2016

“Genuine humor is replete with wisdom,” Mark Twain said. Yet it is wisdom I’m afraid we’ve largely lost, a sense of humor gone with little trace.Not that we don’t laugh anymore. We laugh a lot. It’s easy to find something funny, some comedian to make us giggle. Cheap jokes are still cheap and easy to come by; juvenile laughter has always been and will always be easy to produce. But many comedians today are just that: cheap.There are of course a few great ones still, those who carry the great Ame

Viewpoints June 13, 2016

Opinion polls say Britain’s vote on June 23 on whether to leave the European Union will be close. That’s disturbing: Voting to stay is the safer, wiser choice. The referendum debate should have promoted consensus on the point -- but it hasn’t, partly because the quality of discussion has been a letdown.　Campaigners on both sides of the debate have claimed that a complex issue is really pretty simple. The government-led Remain campaign says “Brexit” would be a catastrophe; the Leave campaign says

Viewpoints June 13, 2016

The strife between two candidate cities for a new airport in the south of the country testifies to the chronic social illness in Korea – extreme sectionalism fanned by politicians. The contention between Gadeokdo Island in Busan and Miryang in South Gyeongsang Province is so intense that there could be serious fallout whichever side wins the airport project. Given the benefits that will come from having an international airport in the neighborhood, local residents may well cling to the project.

Editorial June 12, 2016

The corruption scandal buffeting the People’s Party is setting the first major test for the party’s self-avowed mantra -- new, clean politics. Given what we have been hearing, the chances are that the test result will be negative. The scandal surrounds allegations -- raised by none other than the National Election Commission -- that party officials got back -- in the form of rebates -- 238 million won ($206,000) out of 3.2 billion won they paid to firms hired for the April 13 parliamentary elect

Editorial June 12, 2016