The deadly shooting by a mentally disturbed gunman in Montreal on Wednesday was a horrific capstone to what had been acrimonious and unsettling provincial elections in Quebec. Pauline Marois, the leader of the separatist Parti Quebecois, now becomes premier and vows to push for a referendum on secession for the French-speaking province. Shortly before her victory celebration was thrown into chaos by the gunman, she proclaimed, “The future of Quebec is to become a sovereign country.” The Quebecoi

The Cabinet Office’s Central Disaster Prevention Council said last week that a megaquake of magnitude-9 in the Nankai Trough off the Pacific coasts and its ensuing tsunami could kill up to 323,000 people in 30 prefectures including Tokyo, with about 70 percent of the deaths tsunami-related. Malfunctioning water gates would cause 23,000 more deaths.The estimated number of victims shot up from the 2003 estimate of some 24,700 deaths. By comparison, some 19,000 people died or went missing in the 3/

There are just over two months left until the U.S. presidential election on Nov. 6.The Republican Party, aiming to reclaim the office after a four-year absence, held its national convention in the state of Florida last week and officially nominated former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as its president and House of Representatives Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan as its vice president.In his acceptance speech, Romney sharply criticized U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration for its mism

We keep hearing that the U.S. presidential election is all about jobs. So why aren’t we getting more concrete ideas from the candidates about how to create more of them? That’s a trick question; we know there are no easy answers. Declaring that you will produce 12 million jobs in your first term by lowering taxes, boosting domestic energy production and cutting government spending, as Republican nominee Mitt Romney does, isn’t convincing. Nor is President Barack Obama’s promise to lower unemploy

There still are Kennedy Democrats; there are Clinton Democrats. There are fewer Obama Democrats. This reflects more the president’s style than his substance; he’s in the mainstream of his party, so popular that any primary challenge was out of the question. Yet he remains strangely unfamiliar to some core constituencies. If Barack Obama is reelected, the biggest challenge won’t be ideological: He’s not the left-winger his opponents depict. The economy will be the dominant issue, events will shap

The Indian government will once again demonstrate to the world that it is no longer an independent entity. China’s defence minister General Liang Guanglie started his three-day visit to Mumbai yesterday to discuss revival of joint military exercise and more confidence building measures between both countries. The first exercise was held in China in 2007 and the second in India in 2008. This is the first visit by a Chinese defence minister in the past seven years. Both governments will discuss wa

Having read the GOP’s foreign-policy platform, with its slashing critique of the president, I can already say this: A Mitt Romney foreign policy would likely wind up looking much like Obama’s. Despite a call for another “American century” in which we possess the “strongest military and strongest economy,” a President Romney would soon confront the realities of today’s world.For starters, a hefty part of the GOP’s foreign-policy platform, and its call for global leadership, focuses on boosting th

Shintaro Ishihara, governor of Tokyo, is sending a survey team to the Senkaku Islands on Sunday in defiance of a Japanese government order on visits without permission.Ishihara couldn’t get permission, but his team is visiting three of the eight tiny islets called the Tiaoyu or Diaoyu Islands which both Taiwan and China claim as their inherent territory. The visit is to pave the way for him to buy the islands to defend against the People’s Republic of China in lieu of lame duck Prime Minister Yo

Last week, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei inaugurated the summit of Nonaligned Movement leaders in Tehran with a blistering attack on the “dictatorship” of Western countries at the United Nations Security Council. The Iranians then had to listen stony-faced to Egypt’s President Mohamed Mursi, the first Egyptian head of state to visit Iran since 1979, as he stressed the need for a united opposition to their ally, the murderous Syrian regime. Over several decades NAM summits, includi

In Hugh White’s latest book, “The China Choice: Why America Should Share Power,” the Australian professor argues that, for the sake of regional peace, the United States and China should carve up Asia between them. In particular, the U.S. should consider ceding Indochina to China, the former defence official added.That suggestion has caused apoplexy throughout the region, not least from Vietnam, given its chequered history with China.But if one takes the hard-headed realist’s perspective, one can