“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

When Rio de Janeiro was awarded the 2016 Olympic Games, the Zika virus had yet to reach Brazil. Now, after billions of dollars have been invested in preparing for the Games, Rio de Janeiro state has the second highest number of suspected Zika virus infections. Should the 2016 Summer Olympic Games be postponed or moved elsewhere?  This is a difficult decision, and the facts are still not clear enough. That’s why, last month, I joined 223 scientists, bioethicists, and public health experts in sign

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

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.

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

Hillary Clinton has shot through the glass ceiling to become the first woman presidential nominee -- changing the American political narrative.  There is a degree of pregnant symbolism in the victory. The often misused adjective, “historic,” was seldom so apt as on Tuesday when Hillary Rodham Clinton used the expression twice to celebrate her triumph over Bernie Sanders in the California primary. And she has celebrated her achievement without sounding overly euphoric. Well and truly has the form

Women Cross DMZ, a venerable group of women made up of 30 international leaders, thinkers and activists, crossed the DMZ together in 2015. This was quite a remarkable feat, considering that they were assembled in Pyongyang, North Korea, where thousands of people cheered them on, and that they had traversed the world’s most fortified border southward into the arms of South Korean women waiting to greet them. They concluded the event with a promise to cross the DMZ a year later, this time, going f

The Korea Fair Trade Commission is all set to take a decision on amending the “Guidelines for Review of Resale Price Maintenance” as the public comment period has just concluded.Resale price maintenance, or RPM, is a system in which the manufacturing firm determines and enforces the price at which distributors resell its products. Hence, it is also known as vertical price-fixing, price protection, or the practice of imposed prices.Until now, RPM has been deemed illegal in Korea, and companies th

Financial Technology Partners is a San Francisco-based investment-banking firm focused, appropriately enough, on the financial-technology industry. I managed to get my hands on its new report of how fintech is altering the landscape for money management. The report looks at industry trends, interviews numerous fintech executives and sizes up all of the usual big picture Silicon Valley stuff.For those of you who may not have thought much about how technology might affect Wall Street, the work you

Sometime over the next several years, the next U.S. president could confront a genuinely dangerous threat from a faraway place -- a North Korean missile that can hit U.S. territory with a nuclear warhead. Led by an impulsive and brutal young man, North Korea may pose the most direct nuclear risk to the United States. Kim Jon-un is a weak leader in every respect but one -- he pushes ahead relentlessly on a program to build missiles that can reach Guam and other American targets carrying miniaturi

It is apparent that North Korea does not intend to give in to the international sanctions against its nuclear and missile provocations. The latest evidence of this is the intelligence reports that it is producing more weapons-grade plutonium. The latest report came from the U.S. State Department, in which officials were quoted by the news agency Reuters as saying that North Koreans were producing plutonium by reprocessing fuel spent at the 5-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon. It came one day after si

Nexon Corp., South Korea’s biggest online game developer, is an up-and-coming information technology firm whose online and mobile games are highly popular worldwide. It is a workplace coveted by many young Korean job seekers. But a high-profile scandal involving its founder and a senior prosecutor -- the two went to the same university in the same year -- is threatening to inflict severe damage to the reputation of the company which has grown into one of the most successful and revered IT ventur

Tech start-ups in Southeast Asia and India are drawing venture capitalists from Silicon Valley in California who are heading there for a new round of investment in tech start-ups that are mushrooming thanks to the region’s youthful population and fast-growing number of Internet users.　According to venture forum AVCJ of Hong Kong, the first quarter of this year saw a jump in start-up funds flowing into Singapore, the region’s start-up hub, to $199 million, compared with just $53 million in the sa

Coup options have reduced but resistance to them has grown.Islam and democracy are forever in danger in Pakistan. The danger to Islam is overblown by clerics, it being ensconced safely in millions of highly devoted hearts. Clerics may really be the main threat to it. The danger to democracy is real given past breaks. The Panama leaks suddenly threatened a democracy which was looking secure, though not delivering much. Critics say the real threat to it is from poorly performing politicians and po

With his ask-me-anything, expletives-laden news conferences, he is a wellspring of quotable quotes and click bait. But it can also be exasperating to sort through the muck and try to figure out when he’s being serious or just being theatrical.Rodrigo Duterte is not always a man of his word. He has said so himself, “If it’s preposterous, don’t believe me.” This makes the Philippines’ 16th president a tough nut to crack, especially for people who make a living out of weaving together words, like j

For once, the headlines about the latest health scare are not hyperbole: The end of the Antibiotics Era may be nigh. Staving it off will require fast and creative thinking not only in medical science, but also in public policy.Public-health officials were horrified but not surprised to find a Pennsylvania woman who had an infection with the same kind of drug resistance first identified last fall on farms in China. The E. coli found in the woman carried the same genetic mechanism of resistance to

The German parliament’s recognition of the 1915 genocide of Armenians in Turkey has predictably angered the Turkish government, which has even recalled its ambassador from Berlin. But more importantly, it raised the question of what constitutes sufficient atonement for the past sins of entire nations.The Bundestag’s resolution, which calls the 100-year-old events in the Ottoman empire a genocide, isn’t mere symbolism. Chancellor Angela Merkel, who did her best to delay the vote so it wouldn’t ta

The widening wage gap between conglomerates and small and medium enterprises is hampering the latter from securing competitive human resources, leading to polarization of workers.According to a recent survey, 1 in 4 new employees with a bachelor’s degree or higher quits within a year. And such early exits were three times more common at companies with less than 300 employees than at larger businesses.These were the results of a recent survey conducted on 306 businesses nationwide by the Korea Em

It seems that South Korea’s stock market has become more frequently swayed by external factors. The situation is quite different from past years, when many local and foreign analysts didn’t hesitate to praise the fundamentals of major companies traded on the Korea Exchange, despite some negative external factors.These days, the benchmark KOSPI has become extremely sensitive to remarks by foreign officials or analysts, even if the remarks suggest just a possible option among a variety of scenario

This is the last of a three-part contribution on diplomatic relations between Korea and France, which marked the 130th anniversary of its establishment this year. — Ed. Lending Korea a helping hand in times of crisis They say that “there are no eternal friends or eternal enemies in the international politics”. The cold-blooded nature of the international politics is well expressed by the word “alliance”. Alliances were actively and exclusively pursued by the world powers during the so-called imp