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August 26, 2025

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COMMENTARY

Apr 25, 2012

Reining in rich tax dodgers

By Hugh Cortazzi

British Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne has declared his intention of cracking down on the ways in which rich people in Britain avoid paying their fair share of taxes. He regards tax avoidance by rich people as immoral.

COMMENTARY

Apr 25, 2012

What happens to world's economy if Spain fails?

By Robert Samuelson

Just when you thought the world economy might be improving, along comes Spain. It's Europe's next economic domino, struggling to cope with big budget deficits, massive unemployment and an angry public. Will it fail — and, if so, with what consequences?

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 25, 2012

Pyongyang's next move after the missile fizzle?

By John J. Metzler

In the bizarre ritual of North Korea, a recent rocket launch was intended to put the icing on the dynastic cake of the centennial birthday celebrations of the late dictator Kim Il Sung. The world press had been invited to the reclusive neo-Stalinist state, and the stage was aptly set for the kind of...

COMMENTARY

Apr 24, 2012

'Cruel and unusual' punishment of teenagers

By George Will

In the summer of 1787, just 94 years after the Salem witch trials, as paragons of the Enlightenment such as James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin deliberated in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a mob pelted and otherwise tormented to death a woman accused of being a witch....

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 24, 2012

How much should one's birth gender matter?

By Agata Sagan and Peter Singer

Jenna Talackova reached the finals of Miss Universe Canada last month, before being disqualified because she was not a "natural born" female. The tall, beautiful blonde told the media that she had considered herself a female since she was four years old, had begun hormone treatment at 14, and had sex...

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 24, 2012

Flagging will for gun control

By Adam Winkler

April 16 marked five years since the massacre at Virginia Tech, where a mentally ill student, Seung Hui Cho, used two handguns he had bought legally to kill 32 people and wound 25 others.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 23, 2012

Identifying the world's 'invisibles'

By Davinder Kumar

They have no twitter army, no righteous war being waged for their rescue. They are visible; they are out there on the streets. From ruthless lanes of Dhaka to dangerous dark alleys of Rio, tens of millions of children the world over are daily fighting hunger, violence and abuse just to survive and scratch...

COMMENTARY

Apr 23, 2012

Filling in for the 'Angel in charge of distribution'

By Cesar Chelala

For several years now, New York poet Jack Agueros has been living with Alzheimer's. Slowly but unrelentingly, the disease is erasing his memories. As his daughter Natalia told The New York Times, "There is nothing sadder than a poet without words." The following is a homage to a great poet.

COMMENTARY / World

Apr 23, 2012

Capitalistic consensus moved Brazil investors

By JoÁo Paulo Vasconcellos and Mark Roe

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's visit to Washington earlier this month offers an occasion to consider how some once-poor countries have broken out of poverty, as Brazil has. Development institutions like the World Bank have advocated improving business law as an important way to do so. Are they...

COMMENTARY / World / SENTAKU MAGAZINE

Apr 23, 2012

Land grabs raise security issues

A foreign-capital property buying spree that has extended to areas in and around facilities of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces and the American armed forces could pose a threat to Japan's security.

COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT

Apr 22, 2012

Stalin-era Russian writer penned part of his own death sentence in Japan

By Roger Pulvers

"I don't think there is another nation of people in the world like the Japanese. In Britain there is coal in Wales, but Japan makes up for the lack of such a place with an abundance of national will and national sensitivity ... a people's most hard-to-come-by resources. (These are) the country's biggest...

COMMENTARY

Apr 20, 2012

How Beijing demonstrates a lesson in harmony

By Frank Ching

From the outside it seems as though China's leadership is facing its biggest crisis in a generation with the country's most prominent political star, Bo Xilai, the czar of Chongqing, suddenly dismissed from all of his posts while his wife and a household assistant stand accused of the murder of British...

One of the many entrances to the Kabukicho neighborhood in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Kabukicho: Tokyo’s ‘stadium of desire’

Tetsuzo Shiraishi, speaking at The Center of the Tokyo Raids and War Damage, uses a thermos to explain how he experienced the U.S. firebombing of March 1945, when he was just 7 years old.

From ashes to high-rises: A survivor’s account of Tokyo’s postwar past

By Alex K.T. Martin

SUSTAINABLE JAPAN

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

Smile! It’s ‘Sanrio Time,’ now and ever after

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