During the next three months, North Korea will unload its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, removing fuel rods that can be reprocessed into plutonium for more nuclear weapons. Once again, Pyongyang is offering to negotiate a freeze that would prevent further reprocessing, as it did in June, 1994, leading to the Agreed Framework, and as it has repeatedly offered to do in the six-party talks.

Just after 9/11, the United States allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the stone age” unless it joined the war on terror. In his new book, Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf attributes the ultimatum to Richard Armitage, who flatly denies it. Sounding slightly less sure, President Bush says he was “taken aback by the harshness of the words.”

The U.S. has long viewed the island of Guam, an unincorporated U.S. territory that already hosts two of the Department of Defense's most “valuable” bases in the world, an indispensable part of its “Pacific Century.” Prior to talk of the “Pacific Pivot,” the Governments of Japan (“GOJ”) and the United States agreed to reduce the number of Marines on Okinawa in response to intense local pressure. Defense Department planning for Guam is closely bound up with changing plans for basing in Okinawa. In 2006, the governments of Japan and the US formalized a “roadmap” to move 8,600 Marines from Okinawa to Guam. The plan was contingent, however, on closing the dangerous Futenma Base and expanding an existing base at Henoko, an approach fiercely resisted by Okinawan people and politicians.

Despite the fact that Japan has in the past set the maximum radiation exposure for citizens at 1 millisievert, the government has now increased that amount to 20 millisieverts for Fukushima school children. Defending this twentyfold increase, the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology argues that 20 millisieverts is still within the recommended range of 1-20 millisieverts set by the International Commission on Radiological Protection for exposure in emergency situations. Others question the wisdom of using maximum guidelines for children in areas that may be impacted for years to come. A petition has been launched to urge the Japanese government to repeal this decision as experts write about the potential risks.

When President Vladimir Putin in his State of the Union speech last year called the collapse of the Soviet Union “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century”, cold warriors on both sides of the Atlantic pounced on the statement as fresh evidence of Russia's imperial ambitions.

Very few were prepared to accept Putin's statement at face value - a powerful articulation of an incontrovertible fact from the Russian point of view. The fact remains that half a million Soviet citizens perished during the painful transition, and 50 million people were displaced. Last week, on the anniversary of the August 19 coup that led to the disbandment of the Soviet Union, public opinion in Russia looked back at the events 15 years ago as a crude power struggle devoid of any high principles.

[The following dialogue reads rather like the classic dispute between the Pacifist and the Realist (“To protect the peace, prepare for war”; “But one mustn't …”) carried to a higher level. But quantity becomes quality: when you are talking about nuclear weapons, the conversation is no longer the same as when you are talking about swords or even firearms. This is what Emmanuel Todd doesn't seem to grasp, while Yoshibumi Takamiya (at least partly) does.

Who enshrines the dead? A widely held international principle, that surviving family members determine the disposition of the dead, including those who die in combat, is being tested anew in Japanese courts. Nearly 50,000 Taiwanese and Korean soldiers who died in Japanese uniforms have been enshrined at Yasukuni Shrine without consultation with family members. On May 13, 2004, the Osaka District Court issued its verdict in one of seven lawsuits filed in response to Prime Minister Koizumi Jun'ichiro's pilgrimages to Yasukuni Shrine. It was the first case to address Japan's oppression of indigenous peoples and their mandatory enshrinement at Yasukuni during the nation's colonial rule of Taiwan (1895-1945). Chief Justice Yoshikawa Shin'ichi not only dismissed the plaintiffs’ petition for reparations, but also came up with a novel way of judging whether the Prime Minister's pilgrimages are public or private.

I am an admirer. I love your beauty and your strength, your serenity and your energy, your creativity and your traditions. Beyond that, I am deeply grateful to you for providing me with at least part of the education and experience that allowed me to follow a diplomatic career, one it is true which is over.

Long ago in my teenage years, nothing gave me more joy than reading. Finally the day came though when I wanted to have the type of adventures I had been reading about, so I dropped out of college and hitchhiked around the world. It was in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan that I met a young Japanese musician and reporter who was writing about nomadic peoples. Because I spoke a little Farsi I was able to help him negotiate a price for a horse and guide that was agreeable to all. That was the beginning of my Japanese karma. In fact we later met again by chance in Istanbul. At that point we decided to return to Europe together, where he had once performed as a musician and still seemed to have quite a few girlfriends. When it was time for him to return to Japan he invited me to come along. I was though at the moment deeply involved in learning French with a beautiful young woman, and said if he didn’t mind I would try and come later.

While the United States and South Korea consider whether or not to accept North Korea's call for an “unconditional” return to the Six Party Talks (6PT) or China's call for multilateral negotiations, Northeast Asia is sliding in the direction of deepening conflict that could lead to war. China-Japan relations, which had been warming since the departure of Koizumi Junichiro, and especially since the victory of the Democratic Party of Japan in 2009, are again in a deep freeze over disputed territory. One consequence is a reorientation of Japan's defense strategy southward, in the direction of the Senkakus (Diaoyutai). Washington is encouraging that shift, as well as closer military cooperation between Japan and South Korea. North-South Korea relations are very tense as the result of the Cheonan incident, the North's artillery barrage against a small South Korean island, and revelations of a modern North Korean uranium enrichment plant—all coming in the wake of the Lee Myung Bak administration's almost complete reversal of his predecessors' engagement policies. And China-US relations are increasingly contentious, going beyond the longstanding differences over currency valuation and human rights to include a host of security matters. Even though China-Taiwan relations have improved, U.S. naval activity in the Pacific has picked up, with a number of exercises conducted alone and with allies leading some Chinese analysts to conclude that containment is again prominent on the U.S. policy agenda. And both China and the United States are beefing up their weapons capabilities relevant to the Taiwan Strait.

The look on Nakamae Akira's face said it all. In the somber press conference that followed the end of the 2007 International Whaling Commission conference in Anchorage, the deputy director of Japan's Fisheries Agency was as impassive as an Alaskan iceberg. Japan's silk-smooth spokesman Morishita Joji as always did most of the talking. When Nakamae did eventually answer a single question after spending the bulk of the press conference staring out the window of the Hotel Captain Cook, he was brutally direct: “Why should we leave the IWC, we're not the problem.”

[In this post-hegemonic analysis, Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the New American Foundation, posits a tripolar world pivoting around three poles: China, Europe and the US, each of which will be required to pay growing attention to what he describes as “swing states” and emerging “anti-imperialist belts”. The author is particularly upbeat on the possible merger of European and swing state interests:

… nothing has brought about the erosion of American primacy faster than globalization. While European nations redistribute wealth to secure or maintain first-world living standards, on the battlefield of globalization second-world countries' state-backed firms either outhustle or snap up American companies, leaving their workers to fend for themselves. The second world's first priority is not to become America but to succeed by any means necessary.

German sociologist Ulrich Beck writes that Japan has become part of the ‘World Risk Society’ as a result of the 2011 nuclear accident in Fukushima. By World Risk Society he means a society threatened by such things as nuclear accidents, climate change, and the global financial crisis, presenting a catastrophic risk beyond geographical, temporal, national and social boundaries. According to Beck, such risk is an unfortunate by-product of modernity, and poses entirely new challenges to our existing institutions, which attempt to control it using current, known means. As Gavan McCormack points out, ‘Japan, as one of the most successful capitalist countries in history, represents in concentrated form problems facing contemporary industrial civilization as a whole’. The nuclear, social, and institutional predicaments it now faces epitomise the negative consequences of intensive modernisation.

This is the first of a multi-part article on the South Korean massacres of 1950, the US direct and indirect involvement in those massacres, and the subsequent cover up of the events in South Korea and the United States.

Regardless of rhetoric, there is little doubt that North Korea is not prepared to give up its nuclear capability any time soon. Although it might simply be a bargaining position, Pyongyang has even made it clear that there can be no such outcome until the whole world becomes free of nuclear weapons. That creates a new strategic reality – even if we do not recognize North Korea as a nuclear power, we will have to live side by side with it as a defacto nuclear possessing state for a considerable period of time. While the United States is separated from it by an ocean, for Russia, China and South Korea there is just a river or a border. How are all the parties concerned going to deal with this country?

The easiest way to compare dietary commonalities or peculiarities of individual nations is to check the food balance sheets that the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (headquartered in Rome) prepares for virtually all of the world's countries (FAO 2008). These accounts are based on the best available national statistics of food production and trade and on the estimates of plant and animal harvests diverted to animal feeding, seed and other non-food uses or lost during storage and industrial processing. Their final tallies show per capita annual consumption of individual foodstuffs (in kilograms) and daily intakes of food energy (in kilocalories) and dietary proteins and fats (both in grams). Perhaps the most obvious measure of dietary affluence is the average consumption of animal foods eaten for their special tastes and distinguished in nutritional terms particularly because of their relatively high content of perfect protein.

The pace of Japan's economy is picking up again after more than a decade of stasis. During this long period of economic stagnation, the many personnel practices favoring employees known by the rubric “lifetime employment” have been subjected to increased criticism by pro-investor, neo-liberal voices. Yet other less-well-amplified voices in Japan offer an alternative criticism of, and look for opportunity in, the changing status quo as well. In the last quarter of the 20th century efforts to create worker-owned and democratically governed businesses in Japan began to emerge with the support of a wide variety of economic actors – among them labor unions and union organizers, consumer cooperatives, incomeseeking housewives, the elderly, employees of small businesses, farmers and farm workers, employees of failing firms and maverick employees of large firms. And as worker owned and managed businesses have increased in size and number, their awareness of each other and their common interest in alternative ways to organize production has also grown.

And the men of Ephraim gathered themselves together and went northward, and said unto Jephthah: Wherefore wentest thou to fight with the children of Ammon, and didst not call us to go with thee? We will therefore burn thine house upon thee, with fire.

And Jephthah said unto them: I and my people were at great strife with the children of Ammon. And the LORD delivered them into my hands. Wherefore then are ye come upon me to fight with me.