As expected, South Korean tobacco-makers and retailers have expressed their opposition to the Health Ministry’s new antismoking policies, which require all firms to fix health warning illustrations on their cigarette products. However, the ministry is not being swayed by their arguments and has refused to stand down.The new measures, which will be implemented later this year, require health warnings consisting of text and images to be printed on the top 50 percent of the front panels of all ciga

The revelations about offshore accounts contained in the “Panama Papers” are sensational, but they are unlikely to put an end to these tax havens favored by the world’s rich and powerful.Rather, the disclosures are a reminder that these shelters have been around for close to a century, and have proved remarkably resilient even as they periodically aroused public outrage and calls for reform. In fact, an earlier scandal may have laid the foundation for the tax havens that are now under scrutiny.S

In February, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe called on the National Diet to amend Article 9 of the country’s constitution, which renounces war as a means of settling disputes. Drafted by the United States after World War II, the constitution contains “some parts (that) do not fit into the current period,” Abe said. He is particularly concerned with the constitutional provision that prohibits Japan from maintaining “land, sea, and air forces,” arguing that it seems to be in direct contradictio

There are important lessons to be learned from what went wrong with the NATO-led military intervention in Libya in 2011. U.S. President Barack Obama was right about that in his recent wonderfully frank interview in the Atlantic. But if we are not to compound the world’s misery, we have to take away the right lessons from that intervention.We can agree that Libya is now a mess, with Islamic State forces holding significant ground, the United Nations-facilitated peace process faltering, and atroci

A Chinese proverb says “when reading, do not let a single word escape your attention, one word may be worth a thousand pieces of gold.” In the recent incident involving China’s coast guard in Indonesian waters, it seems that not only a single word, but instead numerous words of the 1982 U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea have escaped the attention of the Chinese.A Chinese fishing vessel, the Kway Fey 10078, suspected of fishing illegally in Indonesia’s Exclusive Economic Zone, was boarded by