Seoul / AFP South Korea and Japan offered muted reactions on Monday to Donald Trump’s suggestion that, as president, he would withdraw troops from both countries and allow them to develop their own nuclear arsenal. There are nearly 30,000 US troops permanently stationed in South Korea and 47,000 in Japan, with little appetite for nuclear weapons in either nation. Asked …

Presidential campaigns incite both hypochondria and euphoria, portraying the present as grimmer than it is and the future as grander than it can be. As an antidote to both, read a rarity, an academic’s thick book (762 pages) widely recognized as relevant to America’s current discontents. Robert Gordon’s “The Rise and Fall of American Growth” argues that an unprecedented and …

Urbanization is posing huge challenges to city planners across the world and these challenges are going to multiply, if the goal of improving quality of life is given a short shrift. Lack of vision and working with myopia will only aggravate the existing woes that urbanites are facing today. Estimates indicate that 70% of the global population will be urban …