Tag: Japan

East Asia

Hokkaido: flashpoint for world war?

Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido seems, unfortunately, poised to jump into the headlines as East Asia's next flashpoint for Great Power confrontation. When North Korea fired a missile over the island last month, it was during unprecedented joint US-Japan military exercises on Hokkaido. Now Russia is conducting its own exercises in the Kuril Islands immediately to the north—including territory that Japan has claimed since the end of World War II.

Oceania

Korea nuclear crisis spurs Guam independence bid

Amid all the hype over North Korea’s threats to fire a nuclear missile at Guam, just a few media accounts have made note of how Guamians themselves are reacting. Guam is usually seen in the US only as a strategic Pentagon outpost. But with a referendum on independence in the offing, growing sentiment on the island holds that the only thing Guamians are getting out of their current US territorial status is being made a nuclear target.

Planet Watch

Paris Agreement on climate change takes effect

As the Paris Agreement took effect, hailed as the first binding climate change treaty, activists charge that it is actually "binding" in name only, with no enforcement mechanisms.

Planet Watch

UN moves to outlaw nuclear weapons in 2017

The UN adopted a resolution—hailed by disarmament campaigners as an important landmark—to launch negotiations in 2017 on a treaty outlawing nuclear weapons.

Europe

Fascist imperative behind relentless terror

There is common political content to all the relentless terror attacks—whether they come from the Islamist right or Islamophobie right, they are equally part of the global reaction.

East Asia

Tiananmen spectacle, historical revisionism

The massive spectacle in Beijing commemorating China's victory in the Sino-Japanese War was preceded by arrests of activists pushing a dissident version of the conflict's history.

Mexico

Fortune magazine ranks top five global cartels

Fortune magazine issued a list of the biggest organized crime groups in the world: elements of Japan's Yakuza, Russian mafia, two Italian syndicates and Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel.

East Asia

Tokyo: thousands protest re-militarization

Some 40,000 protested at the Japanese prime minister's office to oppose the government's reinterpretation of the constitution to allow the military a larger international role.