[The resumption of the railroad link between North and South Korea is emblematic of warming North-South relations and a key to the geopolitics and geoeconomics of Northeast Asia and beyond. This is a two part article on the the significance of the North-South railroad line crossing Korea's DMZ and linking Korea with China, Russia and Europe. The South Korean Yonhap New Agency details the last-minute cancellation of the test run scheduled for May 25, 2006. Russian analyst Georgy Bulychev examines the geopolitics of the project and its importance for North-South and regional accommodation and cooperation.]

Following the onset of Japan's economic recession in the early 1990s, the number of company positions available for prospective high school and university graduates dramatically declined, and young Japanese ceased to enjoy the favorable situation, that had long prevailed in which the great majority of job seekers were able to become permanent employees of companies. At the same time, there was a great increase in the number of young people who were engaged in unstable forms of employment, such as temporary or part time work, and who are known as “freeters.”

[The American war in Southeast Asia featured the most widespread use of chemical warfare since World War I. Earlier, the British had resorted to chemicals in their colonies, Italy did so in Ethiopia, and Japan in China in the 1930s and 1940s. These were lethal chemicals where the Americans thought theirs were not. Iraq in the 1980s made the largest-scale known use of lethal chemical weapons in its Iran war and against its Kurdish minority. But two elements distinguished the U.S. effort in Vietnam. First, massive quantities of these chemicals were used, as the below article makes clear. The amounts cited are equivalent to roughly 60,000 tons of chemical agent. By comparison, in the 1972 Christmas Bombing of North Vietnam, which some hold to be the decisive air campaign of the war, and including both B-52 bombers and tactical aircraft, the Nixon administration loosed some 36,000 tons of munitions over Hanoi and its environs.