In the run-up to the UK’s 2016 referendum on leaving the European Union, and immediately after it, the “remain” campaign was much derided for fearmongering. People are sick and tired of experts warning about doomsday scenarios, said Conservative politician and lead Brexiter Michael Gove. Those warning that Brexit would cost the economy were dubbed “remoaners”; Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Hammond was compared to Eeyore for his caution.　It was, granted, a disastrous campaign strategy: Focus

Amid the slithering mess of problems that emerged in 2017, the one that bothers me most is that people don’t seem to know what’s true anymore. “Facts” this year got put in quotation marks.　All the other political difficulties of the Donald Trump era are subsumed in this one. If we aren’t sure what’s true, how can we act to make things better? If we don’t know where we are on the map, how do we know which way to move? Democracy assumes a well-informed citizenry that argues about solutions -- not

Hong Kong last week celebrated the breaking of the Hang Seng Index 30,000 level, poised to break the peak of 31,958 set on Oct. 30, 2007 that was the last hurrah before the global financial crisis.　Earlier last month, the US Treasury published the third of its reports on the US financial system, with the aim of unwinding much of the tough financial reforms enacted in the post-crisis decade on banking, capital markets and asset management and insurance. A decade of slow growth after taking the to

A Russian high school student expresses sympathy for a German soldier who died in a Soviet prisoner camp after World War II. A wave of condemnation rises on Russian social networks and spills over into parliament. At first glance, nothing to be excited about: Russia is the troll capital of the world. But it also looks an awful lot like a sobering harbinger of what Russia may be like after President Vladimir Putin.On Sunday, a high school student from the Siberian city of Novy Urengoy made a conc

The International Vaccine Institute, an international organization founded 20 years ago in Korea as an initiative of the United Nations Development Program, was a bold vision – a vision that, in 1997, showed remarkable leadership and foresight for a country that had itself risen from the devastation of war to new economic strength. The idea that Korea and its partners pledged to create and sustain was an organization dedicated to the development of low cost, high quality vaccines for low income

President Donald Trump’s continuing courtship of Russian leader Vladimir Putin is casting darkness over US foreign policy. But there is a ray of light where Russia is concerned. The Pentagon is now reportedly beginning preliminary research on a ground-launched cruise missile that would be prohibited under the terms of the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty. This is an overdue step toward making Russia pay for its violations of that accord, and perhaps even positioning America for strategic

Over the last two centuries, the “German question” -- how to contain a Germany whose dominance was buttressed by its commanding size, high productive capacity and geographic position at the heart of Europe -- has occasioned much worry and not a little warfare. Today, with the collapse of negotiations to form a new government coalition, the question has been turned on its head. European leaders worry that Germany is becoming incapable of assuming enough leadership to guide and champion Europe in