Another step closer to global catastrophe. From Kuwait News Agency, Jan. 9 (emphasis added): TOKYO — Japan on Tuesday upgraded the Defense Agency to a full-fledged ministry for the first time since World War II, when the US stripped Japan… Read moreJapan gets Defense Ministry
Now that it has pretty much been confirmed that North Korea did explode a nuclear bomb, if a very small one, comes the news that it may be ready to repeat the feat on short order. Yes, this is deeply… Read moreMethod to North Korea’s nuclear madness?
As of this writing, some 12 hours after North Korea announced its first test of a nuclear weapon, at an underground site in North Hamgyong province, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has still not moved the hands of the famous… Read moreNorth Korea joins the club —or does it?
The growing repression in China against peasants struggling to keep their lands before the onslaught of “development”—and now against their lawyers—is clearly analogous to peasant struggles raging throughout Latin America. Note the reference to forced sterilizations of peasants in the… Read moreChina detains lawyers for peasant advocate
Way to go, Mr. Sensitive. From Japan’s Yomiuri Shimbun, Aug. 16: Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi visited Yasukuni Shrine in central Tokyo on Tuesday–the 61st anniversary of the end of World War II–writing his name as prime minister in the shrine’s… Read moreKoizumi visits Yasukuni on VJ Day
The really amazing thing about China is that both the knee-jerk right-wingers who love to hate it and the idiot leftists who love to love it are both laboring under the illusion that it is Communist. The self-serving capitalist elite… Read moreChina: workers revolt at Mickey D’s contract factory
Voice of America reports June 26 that the US will be deploying Patriot missile batteries in Japan under an agreement reached May 1 in response to the supposed threat from North Korea. AFP adds that the US Missile Defence Agency… Read moreUS plans Japan anti-missile base, neo-militarists pleased
The Japanese constitution—ironically imposed at US behest after World War II—states that “land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Now Japanese warships participate in US military maneuvers in the Pacific. From AFP,… Read moreJapan participates in US Pacific missile test
This wave of peasant protest is the first glimmer of real opposition in China since Tiananmen Square. Yet it is getting little media coverage, and the outside world is largely ignoring it. The protests have been sweeping the industrial heartland… Read moreChina: more anti-pollution protests
From IndyBay.org, March 7: Pyeongtaek, South Korea – On March 6th, 2006, South Korean military riot police began an attack on the autonomous village of Daechuri. For over four years, Daechuri and the nearby community of Doduri have defiantly resisted… Read moreSouth Korea: army sieges “autonomous village”
In three days, the Tokyo stock market lost almost $400 billion in value. (ABC, Jan. 20) The crash comes at a moment of converging multiple crises for the Japanese state. On Jan. 19, some 800 protesters, mostly connected to Shinto… Read more“Tokyo Panic” to fuel nationalist backlash?
Yet another report of peasant protesters killed by the security forces in (nominally communist) China. Is there any national coordination to the fast-growing peasant movement? Is anyone working in the West to loan them solidarity? From the Jan. 17 New… Read moreMore peasant unrest in China
