NEWPORT BEACH ― August is traditionally Europe’s holiday month, with many government officials taking several weeks off. In the process, important initiatives are put on hold until the “great return” at the beginning of September.This year, there is another reason why Europe has pressed the pause button for August. With a looming election in Germany, few wish to undermine Chancellor Angela Merkel’s likely victory. After all, Germany is central to Europe’s well-being, and Merkel’s steady hand has

It is not so long since the India-U.S. nuclear deal ushered in a new era in relations between the two countries. The edginess that had so often intruded seemed to have been definitively set aside, to be replaced by a genuine spirit of goodwill and cooperation. The nuclear issue had been the most prominent among the differences between the two countries, a seemingly impermeable barrier between them. The U.S. felt obliged to impose sanctions on many types of nuclear-related transactions between th

WASHINGTON ― It’s easy to talk about how change is good, but when it actually happens it‘s a shock. It felt that way for hundreds of Washington Post employees on Monday when we heard our boss, Donald Graham, tell us that he was selling the newspaper. To appreciate what happened this week, you have to understand how personal the owner’s relationship was with the Post. This is a CEO who kept at the entry to his office an old wooden cart used to distribute the paper when it was called The Post and

This year’s jangma is finally over after a record two-month stretch. While the rain front moved up and down the peninsula from mid-June, the nation had too much disturbing news that further annoyed people who were under nature’s merciless attack with floods, landslides, unbearable heat and humidity. Most saddening was the sacrifice of six workers ― three from China ― in the flooding of a piped water facility construction site in Seoul. Then we lost five high-school boys at a poorly supervised se

With Seoul National University’s recent decision to designate Korean history a required subject for applicants, other universities are beginning to follow suit. There is no need to debate the importance of history education. However, a more essential and urgent question we must ask is how do we want to teach history? It is well known that secondary school history education in Korea today is seriously distorted by radical, pro-North Korea teachers who teach, for example, that the Korean War was a

An unexpected turn of events occurred last Saturday in the three-year legal battle saga between Samsung and Apple. Since 2011, the two digital giants have been engaged in more than 30 legal proceedings in more than a dozen jurisdictions worldwide claiming patent infringement. And now the plot thickens as the U.S. government enters the fray between the two private corporations.So came the veto by the Obama administration of the United States International Trade Commission’s June ruling in favor o