CAIRO ― From Nazi Germany to Rwanda, some of the most inhumane atrocities and genocides were committed while the rest of the world was watching. Today we are all witnessing the atrocities and mass destruction in Syria. Again we are observing it all unfold before our eyes, with heavy hearts perhaps, but no effective intervention to stop it.The regime of Bashar al-Assad is brutal. It is fighting a war with its own people, shelling them from the sea, bombing them from the air, and murdering them in

When Shinzo Abe, the leader of Japan’s main opposition party, talks about his vision for the country’s diplomacy and security, East Asia has every reason to prick up its ears.Opinion polls in Japan suggest the Liberal Democratic Party will win the House of Representatives election on Dec. 16, positioning Abe to become the next prime minister.He was eager to show his hardline credentials when releasing his party’s campaign pledges on Wednesday, presenting himself as a tough nut to crack if he tak

Superstorm Sandy capped a year of bad weather in the United States. Droughts in the Midwest that dried up fields from Iowa to Texas. Heat waves along the Atlantic Seaboard and points inland last summer. An oddball winter that left typically snowy states in the Upper Midwest practically snowless while other areas were repeatedly blanketed with the white stuff.These unseasonal and dramatic events have wrought all kinds of havoc, but they have also had one positive effect: growing awareness that we

It may turn out that the editors of the English language edition of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece, People’s Daily, were only kidding when they ran a 55-image slideshow based on “Kim Jong-un Named The Onion’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2012.” But if it turns out that they weren’t, the explanation for how such an article ended up in China’s most important tribunal isn’t so hard to parse. In three distinct ways, the Onion’s satire was perfectly engineered to appeal to editorial biases ― some

The Mainland Affairs Council and the Presidential Office have both stepped up and asked the PRC government to not endanger the status quo by including two pages of scenery from Taiwan, as well as a map of the PRC’s claimed territory showing dashed lines going around Taiwan’s eastern seaboard, in its new microchip passports. The dashed lines extend southward to cover a vast disputed area in the South China Sea, triggering protests from rival claimants including Vietnam, the Philippines and even I

How should Japan achieve a stable supply of power, which is indispensable for people’s livelihoods and economic growth? Energy policies will become a major issue in the House of Representatives election to be held Dec. 16.Nuclear power policies by the ruling and opposition parties have come under the spotlight due to the crisis at Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant following the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami.It will be difficult to resolve many issues facing

Ohio, the mother of all tossup states, gave its 18 electoral votes ― and with them, the White House ― to Barack Obama on Nov. 6. Democratic U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown won reelection. Yet Republicans won 12 of Ohio’s 16 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Obama won by five points in Pennsylvania, where Democrats also swept four statewide races. But Republicans took 13 of the state’s 18 U.S. House seats.Democrats who had hoped to reclaim a majority in the House came up way short, even with

It may be surprising to learn that, of the many maritime disputes in Asia, one of the most violent in the past few years has occurred between South Korea and China in the Yellow Sea.On Oct. 16 a 44-year-old Chinese fisherman died when hit by a rubber bullet fired by a member of the Republic of Korea Coast Guard, which had stopped a Chinese trawler fishing illegally in South Korea’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ). Past incidents include the death of two Chinese fishermen in December 2010, the kill

For Shinzo Abe, it isn’t enough to see Sony Corp. and Panasonic Corp., two icons of industrial Japan, reduced to junk-debt status. The man who probably will become prime minister next month might do the same for the yen. That is the upshot of his desire to browbeat the Bank of Japan into unlimited easing. Granted, his Liberal Democratic Party did that for most of the half-century it was in power until 2009. But Abe’s designs on the BOJ smack of a monetary jihad that would do more harm than good.