To call Kim Kyeong-ho a master calligrapher seems like an understatement. His transcriptions of the sutras, the Buddha’s teachings, lead viewers to wonder about the limits of human ability. Ultrathin lines no thicker than a fraction of 1 millimeter form intricate designs and paintings that decorate the scripts. One such example depicts Buddha figures, almost invisible if not scrutinized with a magnifying glass, hidden inside minuscule pagodas. “I did this many years ago. I

Kim Soung-soo (fourth from left, second row), chairman of Youth For Understanding Korea, a nonprofit student exchange organization, poses with Korean and Japanese participants in the 2018-2019 exchange program sponsored by Toyota Korea. Also present in the ceremony held in Seoul last week were In Sung-yeon (second from left, second row), YFU Korea assistant national director; Nobuyuki Takemura (third from left), head of Toyota Korea; and Keiko Enatsu (fifth from left), national director of YFU J

This article was contributed by the Embassy of Ukraine. – Ed.What do Koreans know about Ukraine? Perhaps, some still remember a breathtaking triumph of a Ukrainian athlete Sehii Bubka at 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul. Those into football probably know Andrii Shevchenko, a “Golden Ball” winner and legendary striker for Milan and Chelsea. Some Koreans probably think of Ukraine as a mysterious country in Europe, with the most beautiful women in the world. Of course, there is a lot more to Ukraine w

US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart pledged Saturday to work to denuclearize North Korea, but Trump again invoked the grim possibility of “military measures” if other steps should fail.Trump’s latest warning came amid a flurry of international calls -- from China, the North’s key ally, as well as Russia, Germany, Britain and the United Nations -- for the president to show greater rhetorical restraint. (Yonhap)A White House statement said Trump and French President Emmanuel Macro

A little-known court in the Netherlands rattled Asia this week. The Permanent Court of Arbitration concluded that China has no legal basis for its expansive claims in the South China Sea, where China has been attempting to intimidate its neighbors into conceding their rights.　While the overlapping claims are devilishly complicated, the main point is that China, Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam all have competing claims in the South China Sea. The U.N. Convention on the Law o

Two political events that are attracting global attention these days -- the vote in the United Kingdom to leave the European Union and Donald Trump’s presidential campaign in the United States -- have much in common. Just over half of U.K. voters chose Brexit, a result that has cast a long shadow over their country’s political system and economic prospects. Perhaps understanding the parallels between the two campaigns will help U.S. voters avoid taking a similar path in November.　One parallel is

The leaders of the remaining 27 European Union members have spoken on Brexit, and it would appear that they spoke with one voice. Could it be, however, that France and Germany, the EU-27’s two leaders, really have different approaches to handling the U.K.’s  departure?　　The statement from their Brussels gathering this week was calm and firm: The U.K. should start the formal withdrawal process “as soon as possible,” but hopefully it will remain a close partner. It can, however, only be part of th

For a kingdom that has survived by hedging its bets and resisting change, Saudi Arabia’s Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman proposes a series of sweeping reforms: 　Saudi Aramco and other big, state-owned enterprises would be privatized; cinemas, museums and a “media city” would be created for a young population starving for entertainment; the power of the religious police would be curtailed; and, at some point, women would be allowed to drive.　MBS, as the 30-year-old prince is known, propos

A year ago this month, President Obama was delivering a eulogy in Charleston, South Carolina, after the mass shooting in a church there. As he neared the end, he took a long pause and then began singing “Amazing Grace.”　It was an unforgettable, transcendent moment. Michelle Obama had reportedly cautioned him against singing, but Obama told her on the trip to Charleston that he might do it anyway. Until he began, even he probably wasn’t sure.　Peter Manseau wrote in The Atlantic magazine about the

So Britain might actually do it. With a week to go before the referendum on June 23, recent polls say the campaign to quit the European Union is ahead. The government and its allies in the Remain campaign are alarmed.　Why is this happening?　The excellence of the Leave campaign certainly isn’t the reason. Advocates of Brexit made a weak case, unable to say what leaving the EU would mean for the country’s future trade arrangements or which parts of EU law would be re-adopted and which discarded. I

China is arguably the valedictorian of Asia’s MBA program. When Deng Xiaoping ditched the radical economics of Mao and steered China into the global economy beginning in the early 1980s, he borrowed liberally from programs and policies that had earlier ignited rapid growth in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The student quickly outshone the teachers, riding an export-led, investment-heavy strategy to years of double-digit growth.　Now, however, China’s President Xi Jinping app

　 The West is suffering from what one leading strategist calls an “autoimmune disease” in trying to fight the Islamic State group. The self-defense mechanisms championed by Donald Trump and his European neo-populist counterparts have gone into toxic overdrive -- weakening the West’s body politic and making the jihadist fever far worse.　David Kenning, a British counter-radicalization expert, made this provocative argument in a telephone interview this week, and in recent research for various West

Donald Trump’s loyal voters share something with the jurors in the O.J. Simpson trial: a predisposition to ignore disturbing, hard facts while buying into a narrative that absolves their celebrity hero, acknowledges their own grievances and reinforces their perception of how the world works.　With lifetimes of negative experiences that made them suspicious of the Los Angeles Police Department, the African-American jurors who formed the majority on the Simpson trial jury were inclined from the sta

What do people mean when they criticize generals for “fighting the last war”? It’s not that generals ever think they will face the same weapon systems and the same battlefields. They certainly know better. 　The error, to the extent that the generals make it, must operate at a more subtle level. Generals are sometimes slow to get around to developing plans and ordnance for those new weapon systems and battlefields. 　And just as important, they sometimes assume that the public psychology, and the

When it comes to the rise in economic inequality since the 1970s in the United States and some other advanced economies, it doesn’t really matter which measure of income distribution we choose: They all show the increase. And, while many competing explanations have been proposed, we do not need to agree about causes to concur on sensible policies to address the problem.There are many ways to measure inequality. Each can tell us something different. Many Asian countries’ recent economic success h

Sounding a lot like Bill Clinton, the beleaguered governor of Alabama, Robert Bentley, called a news conference on Wednesday to say in no uncertain terms that he did not have sex with that woman.Accused of having an illicit relationship with an aide, Rebekah Caldwell Mason, he stopped short of wagging his finger. But, in another Clinton parallel, there is readily available evidence that contradicts his denials: Text messages and audio recordings made public by the Alabama Media Group and the gov

One of the biggest stories in science right now is the fight over the Crispr patents. Crispr is a gene editing technique that promises to allow previously unthinkable feats of bioengineering. It was discovered in stages, like most scientific breakthroughs, by multiple teams working at various universities and research institutes around the world. The final, key advancements were made more-or-less simultaneously by two teams of researchers -- one based in California and led by Jennifer Doudna and

Something interesting has emerged in voting patterns on both sides of the Atlantic: Young people are voting in ways that are markedly different from their elders. A great divide appears to have opened up, based not so much on income, education, or gender as on the voters’ generation.　There are good reasons for this divide. The lives of both old and young, as they are now lived, are different. Their pasts are different, and so are their prospects.　The Cold War, for example, was over even before s

While Internet accessibility in Asia continues to expand across tech devices and platforms, so too are the ways Internet scams infiltrate consumers’ personal information. 　Work from home fraud, Internet auction scams and fake bank email scams are the top three scams in Asia, according to Telenor Group’s recent Internet scams study.　The multimarket survey assessed the impact of scams on 400 Internet users aged 18 up to over 65 in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and India, and was conducted to provi

The worlds of Go and artificial intelligence were both unsettled by the victory this week of an advanced AI computer over one of the world’s leading masters of the intricate Japanese board game, 4 games to 1. It’s an achievement that experts in both fields didn’t expect to happen for as long as 10 years.　The triumph of AlphaGo, the product of a Google lab named DeepMind, over the fourth-ranked Go champion Lee Se-dol of South Korea, is widely viewed as a landmark in artificial intelligence much g