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Trumpism is attacking America's core institutions to gain unchecked power, and only a united civic uprising that defends and reforms these institutions can stop it and build a better future.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 27, 2025

Time for a civic uprising

What’s happening is not normal. America needs an uprising that is not normal.
U.S. President Donald Trump's foreign policy efforts, including negotiations with Ukraine, Iran and others face failure due to unrealistic expectations and an apparent failure to fully understand the complexities of the conflicts.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 23, 2025

U.S. diplomacy confronts reality in Ukraine and Iran

Trump loyalists must recognize that his approach may well fail in ways that leave the world in immeasurably worse shape.
An artist's impression of the K2-18b super-Earth, the only super-Earth exoplanet known to host both water and temperatures that could support life
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 28, 2025

In a galaxy far, far away ... did we find life?

K2-18b, which has eight times the mass of Earth, just might be covered with a massive ocean and blanketed by an atmosphere complete with water vapor and rain clouds.
U.S. President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office on Wednesday. His push for quick wins through tariffs and other measures is risking trade turmoil with key allies like Japan.
COMMENTARY / World / Geoeconomic Briefing
Apr 28, 2025

Is there a method behind the Trumponomics madness?

Washington’s policies are treading and often crossing a fine line between political jostling and economic strategizing.
Stopping superpollutants like methane, which is the most potent short-lived climate pollutant, offers a fast-track opportunity to slow warming and improve public health, yet global climate plans have only recently begun to target them explicitly.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 28, 2025

The world is waking up to the dangers of superpollutants

Cutting superpollutants like methane offers a fast way to slow warming and boost public health, but climate plans have only recently begun to target them.
Despite China’s 30-year propaganda campaign that peace would be ensured if cross-strait disputes were settled internally, Beijing’s actual behaviors suggest otherwise.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 28, 2025

Placating China won't prevent it from invading Taiwan

Many Taiwanese misperceive China’s rational logic behind potential invasion risks, influenced by Beijing’s propaganda and exacerbated by Taiwan's current political landscape.
U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping attend the Group of 20 leaders summit in Buenos Aires in December 2018. Instead of appeasing dictators and shredding alliances, the U.S. should beef up its network of partners. Alone, it won’t emerge victorious from the rivalry with Beijing.  
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 29, 2025

How to make America truly 'great again'

Instead of trying to go it alone, Washington should fix its internal problems and build up its external alliances if it wants to come out on top of the competition with China.
Demonstrators hold a rally against U.S. President Donald Trump's attacks on Harvard University at its campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on April 17.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 29, 2025

Stop scaring future world leaders off U.S. campuses

To the extent that a U.S. education gets others to think as Americans think, it is the ideal tool of soft power
Japan's proposed "one-theater" defense strategy, linking the East China Sea, South China Sea and Korean Peninsula has raised concerns, particularly in South Korea, about its implications for regional security.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 30, 2025

Japan’s ‘one-theater’ defense concept rattles South Korea

Continuing expansion of SDF roles and missions is consistent with adoption of the "Free and Open Indo-Pacific" construct that guides Japanese security policy.
Liberal Democratic Party Secretary-General Hiroshi Moriyama (left), who also chairs the Japan-China Parliamentary Friendship Association, meets with Zhao Leji, the third-ranked official in the Chinese Communist Party and chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, in Beijing on Tuesday.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 30, 2025

Communist China’s quiet influence on Japanese politics

China Communist Party influence operations have been embedded in the Japanese government and political structures for 75 years.
A woman takes part in an OpenNyAI field trial in Bengaluru, India, in April 2023. The AI trial was aimed at helping some of the nation’s poorest people access money from government anti-poverty programs.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 30, 2025

Will AI close or widen the development gap?

The social, economic and political effects of AI will not naturally bend toward inclusion or equity across the global economy.
From 2028, all newly let U.K. properties must have an Energy Performance Certificate rating of at least C, though currently only 40% of rentals meet or exceed that threshold.
COMMENTARY / World
Apr 24, 2025

London rents surge. Why are landlords miserable?

The landlord exodus story, which we’ve been hearing about for years, has evolved into a quantifiable phenomenon.
Yosuke Kubozuka plays a university professor with some unorthodox theories about the ancestry of Japanese people in “The Killer Goldfish.”
CULTURE / Film
May 1, 2025

‘The Killer Goldfish’: The future of cinema, or just indie cosplay?

If veteran director Yukihiko Tsutsumi and his collaborators want to upend the Japanese film industry, they’re going to have to come up with something better than this.

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A small shrine perched atop rocks braves the waves hitting the shoreline during a storm in Shimoda, Shizuoka Prefecture. The area is under threat of a possible 31-meter-high tsunami if an earthquake strikes the nearby Nankai Trough.
If the 'Big One' hits, this city could face a 31-meter-high tsunami