Every year around this time, in the run-up to the Aug. 15 anniversary of Japan’s surrender in 1945, feverish speculation ensues about whether Japan’s top politicians will visit the Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo. Chinese and South Koreans ― not to mention many Japanese ― abhor such visits because the shrine honors the souls of 14 Class A war criminals. Visitors say they have every right to honor the 2.5 million other Japanese war dead celebrated at Yasukuni; they compare the shrine to the U.S.

LONDON ― Syria is a living nightmare. Egypt hovers on the brink. But, as the opening of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority shows, there are signs of hope. And, though it may seem counter-intuitive, the region’s turmoil is finally bringing to the surface its fundamental problems in a way that allows them to be confronted and overcome. Now is a time not for despair, but for active engagement.No one put the chances of reviving the Israel-Palestine peace process at more than mi

Job growth is sputtering. So why aren’t the captains of American industry and finance ― the nation’s top CEOs, the titans of Wall Street, the corporate movers and shakers ― demanding that more be done to revive the economy? They have the political clout to make it happen.It can’t be they don’t know that job growth is sputtering. The data are indisputable. July’s job growth of 162,000 jobs was the weakest in four months. The average workweek was the shortest in six months. The Bureau of Labor Sta

NEW YORK ― With leadership transitions at many central banks either under way or coming soon, many of those who were partly responsible for creating the global economic crisis that erupted in 2008 ― before taking strong action to prevent the worst ― are departing to mixed reviews. The main question now is the extent to which those reviews will influence their successors’ behavior.Many financial-market players are grateful for the regulatory laxity that allowed them to reap enormous profits befor

MELBOURNE, Australia ― Earlier this year, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 400 parts per million (ppm). The last time there was that much CO2 in our atmosphere was three million years ago, when sea levels were 24 meters higher than they are today. Now sea levels are rising again. Last September, Arctic sea ice covered the smallest area ever recorded. All but one of the ten warmest years since 1880, when global records began to be kept, have occurred in the twenty-fir

The French sociologist Luc Boltanski has argued that conspiracy theories and general public suspicion toward the state apparatus tend to thrive in bureaucratic societies where the information gap between those in power and those without increases. Now, since WikiLeaks set in motion a series of spectacular cases revealing the nature and extent of covert government operations, it would seem that the word “suspicion” hardly makes sense anymore, at least not in the way it used to. For with the acces