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August 27, 2025

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COMMENTARY

Mar 23, 2009

Costly transfer to Guam

By Kiroku Hanai

PARIS — It was welcome news for the struggling government of Prime Minister Taro Aso that the Obama administration has given Japan a high priority in its foreign policy agenda. In mid-February, Hillary Rodham Clinton chose Japan as the first country to visit as U.S. secretary of state, and later that...

COMMENTARY / COUNTERPOINT

Mar 22, 2009

Raising bilingual children takes time, huge effort — and lotsa money

By Roger Pulvers

An American friend recently asked me a difficult question: How do you bring up a bilingual child?

COMMENTARY

Mar 22, 2009

Legacy of a 'disappeared' family in Argentina

By Cesar Chelala

Politics can have a devastating effect on a country and its people, as I discovered during a recent trip to Argentina.

EDITORIALS

Mar 22, 2009

Economic crisis deepens

The economic news continues to worsen. A new World Bank report forecasts a crisis that will spare no country and threatens to roll back decades of progress in the war against poverty. In one of the more sickening ironies of the moment, developing nations may be hurt the worst, even though they are bystanders...

EDITORIALS

Mar 21, 2009

Boost reactors' quake resistance

The Kanazawa District Court in March 2006 ordered Hokuriku Electric Power Co. to shut down the No. 2 reactor at its Shika nuclear power station in Ishikawa Prefecture — the nation's second largest power reactor. The unprecedented ruling said the reactor lacked sufficient earthquake resistance and could...

EDITORIALS

Mar 21, 2009

Act responsibly, Pyongyang

North Korea has notified two United Nations agencies — the International Maritime Organization and the International Civil Aviation Organization — of its plan to launch a communications satellite between April 4 and 8. The first stage of the rocket is expected to fall in the Sea of Japan only about...

COMMENTARY

Mar 21, 2009

Are Earth's oceanic 'carbon sinks' filling up?

By Michael Richardson

Russian and South Korean scientists made a disturbing discovery recently in the Sea of Japan. They found that the amount of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas, being absorbed in the water dropped by half between 1992 and 2007.

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 20, 2009

India's newfound irrelevance to Washington

By Harsh V. Pant

LONDON — For the last eight years under the Bush administration, India occupied a pride of place in the strategic calculus of the United States. India was wooed as a rising power, it was seen as a pole in the emerging global balance of power; it was acknowledged as the primary actor in South Asia;...

COMMENTARY

Mar 20, 2009

New consensus in Pakistan

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON — The dancing in the streets in Pakistan after the latest political crisis ended may have been overdone, but the relief was genuine. Americans should be dancing in the streets, too, because what has happened in Pakistan will probably force the United States to abandon its foolish anti-Pashtun...

EDITORIALS

Mar 20, 2009

A new Iron Curtain in Europe?

The global economic crisis threatens to divide Europe anew. While all of Europe is being battered by the slowdown, Eastern Europe is even more vulnerable and exposed than its Western neighbors. Yet, the two sets of economies are deeply connected. A plunge in the east will wash — not ripple — across...

EDITORIALS

Mar 19, 2009

Getting ready to take action

Finance ministers and central bankers from the Group of 20 nations met last week to prepare for the coming G20 summit and agreed to "take whatever action is necessary until growth is restored." Although a division surfaced among the participating nations, the commitment to efforts to attain recovery...

COMMENTARY / World

Mar 19, 2009

A place for charity even in these tough times

By Peter Singer

PRINCETON, New Jersey — As I tour America promoting my new book, "The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty," I am often asked if this isn't the wrong time to call on affluent people to increase their effort to end poverty in other countries. I reply emphatically that it is not. There...

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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