Smart power.

I guess it didn’t work. Clifford Hart, the State Department’s special envoy to the now-defunct six-party talks, met North Korea’s deputy ambassador to the United Nations Han Song-ryol in mid-March, just before North Korea began its latest string of provocative statements and actions, diplomatic sources said. The meeting was done through what’s known in diplomatic [...]

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...and US consumers will pay the price.

Does Asian trade policy hold a larger lesson about the decline of our republic? A couple of weeks ago, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced that Tokyo would seek to join talks on a U.S.-led Pacific free trade pact called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). Opening Japan to more competition is a significant (and the most [...]

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Hmmm.

Talk about mixed messages.  While Pyongyang blusters about re-entering a state of war with Seoul and Washington and announces that its missiles are on alert and aimed at American targets, the Kim regime suddenly made its only known “reformer” the official face of the Kim regime:  North Korea’s parliament named former premier Pak Pong-ju, who was [...]

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"Boiled pumpkin"?

If the recent bluster from Pyongyang has intended to test the newly-elected South Korean president Park Geun-hye, they have their answer today. Park warned that Seoul was preparing “a strong response,” as the US added another high-profile flyover to the joint military maneuvers: The South Korean president on Monday warned North Korea that any provocative [...]

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Health risks overstated?

Two years ago today, an earthquake and tsunami wreaked havoc on Japan, killing almost 16,000 people with another 2600 still listed as missing. Estimates of the cost of the destruction go as high as $235 billion, making it the costliest natural disaster in history.  One aspect of the disaster dominated the news for weeks afterward [...]

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Culture of death.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade which transformed abortion from a procedure regulated on a state-by-state basis into a Constitutional right, emanating from invisible penumbras. What has been the consequence of the abortion-on-demand era?  More than 55 million abortions have taken place — which amounts to [...]

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Bottom line.

Revealingly, he’s the country’s finance minister. A quick bit of googling reveals that people think he was talking about letting elderly patients who don’t want to linger in the hospital choose assisted suicide. Could be, but the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio is over 200 percent and, thanks to its appalling birthrate, more than 40 percent of [...]

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Lies and damned lies

The fallout from the March 2011 earthquake and tsunami which devastated Japan is still going on, and now it’s affecting some United States military members. A group of sailors from the USS Ronald Reagan – who participated in rescue efforts during the disaster – are going to court saying that Tokyo Electric Power Company lied [...]

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Sovereignty.

A dispute over a small island group heated up considerably this morning after China sent a government aircraft into Japanese airspace to surveil the uninhabited Senkaku Islands.  Japan scrambled F-15s to confront the plane, which left without incident, but the two nations have traded diplomatic shots over the incident, CNN reports: Japan has filed a [...]

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Showdown.

Twitter is blowing up over this as I’m writing. The best thing I can do to get you up to speed is send you to this nifty Foreign Policy precis of the standoff. Nutshell version: Japan says the islands, which it calls the Senkaku, belong to it. (In fact, the Japanese government formally purchased them [...]

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Singing the blues.

When pressed to explain why the US recovery in the last three years has fizzled in comparison to other post-WWII US recoveries, especially in job creation, Barack Obama usually says that the Great Recession was such an unusual event that it cannot be directly compared to any other American recovery.  In the 2008 crash, unlike [...]

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Oh my.

We need a palate cleanser/tension breaker while we wait for Wisconsin results, and this one’s got it all — neat-o gizmos, a timely nanny-state tie-in, and the evergreen “Japan sure is weird” angle. The good news? With the patented new Freakydeaky goggles, you can virtually supersize your government-regulated 16-ounce soda to make it a Big [...]

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It's come to this.

Via Kotaku and Popular Science, it’s been far too long since we’ve had a “Japan is insane” video reminder. Granted, nothing will top this one, but a palate cleanser doesn’t need to be indelible to serve its purpose. All it needs to do is make you gape in horror until your news-related worries float away. [...]

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Escalation.

No links yet but that’s the screaming headline at ABC News. Their story should be up momentarily; I’ll update below as the wires start moving. An obvious question right out of the chute: Did the launch fail on the pad or in mid-flight? Remember, they launched a long-range (Taepodong) missile in 2006 too and that [...]

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Satellite.

North Korea plans to launch a satellite into space sometime this week … if you believe their state-run media.  The DPRK’s neighbors believe that the military wants to run another test of its failure-plagued ballistic missile system, and in any case, the launch will violate a UN Security Council resolution that bars Pyongyang from any [...]

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Provocative?

Less than three weeks ago, North Korea agreed to a moratorium on long-range missile testing in exchange for badly-needed food.  Today, the Kim Jong-un regime announced that it would launch a satellite into orbit, just coincidentally on the very same missile platform Pyongyang has been testing for military use: The US is … not amused: [...]

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