As President Trump prepares to head to Asia next month for his most important overseas trip yet, foreign intelligence services are undoubtedly trying to assemble personality profiles to explain this unconventional, risk-taking, domineering president to the leaders he will meet. How will they describe Trump? Probably not with the same hyperbole we sometimes use in our daily news commentary. Foreign governments aren’t as easily shocked or offended as journalists. They‘re used to bullying autocrats

By swiftly replacing 11 of 85 regional governors in the past two weeks, President Vladimir Putin is previewing plans to run Russia as a corporation after his all-but-inevitable victory in next year’s presidential election.Long tired of politics, he needs to set up a formal system that doesn’t depend upon former bodyguards and other loyal retainers -- there aren’t enough of them anyway. Instead, he’s seeking to borrow selection techniques from large corporations, according to commentators close t

Shortly before Chuseok, the Korean thanksgiving, earlier this month, I had the opportunity to step back from the front line of daily news production and take a break. I stayed a wonderful five nights and six days in Riga, the capital of Latvia, as part of a South Korean media delegation. It was slightly off the “best season” for travel in the Baltic state -- spring and summer -- but luckily the weather was mostly favorable, almost like the weather in Seoul now. With its beautiful medieval city c

The same scenes are repeated each fall. Angry faces, shouting matches and group boycotts, and all these in front of national TV cameras. The National Assembly started this year’s plenary national audit on Oct. 12. It will run for 20 days until Oct. 31. The first four days of the audit indicate that we can expect the same this year as well. To governmental agencies and entities with state funding, the annual audit is one of the most critical moments of the year for leaders and organizations alike

Reading nineteenth century American literature, we encounter a number of memorable characters. Among others, Rip Van Winkle, Huckleberry Finn, and Hester Prynne come to mind as they are unforgettably charming protagonists.Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle is known to be an archetypal American man who “was a simple, good-natured man; he was, moreover, a kind neighbor, and an obedient, hen-pecked husband.” Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, too, is a typical American man who constantly wants to explore the

There has been so much hype about artificial intelligence that rock-star historian-turned-futurist Yuval Noah Harari thinks that man (Homo sapiens) will evolve into Homo deus -- almost god-like through technology and science, conquering famine, war and possibly even death. We used to suspend belief through science fiction, until large parts of the gadgets that we watched in “Star Trek” in the 1960s become reality. With the ability of computers to beat the best human Go champion, science fiction