The anti-Gadhafi uprising in Libya entered its fourth week and the nation is sliding toward a civil war while the international community can find no effective way of intervening in the situation to stop the violence. The outside world is unable to estimate casualty figures even approximately, as fighting goes on in population centers along the northern coast. All the Western powers and the United

Editorial March 8, 2011

In the highly confrontational politics in this country, the ruling and opposition parties rarely act in unison over a legislative plan. The almost only exceptions are when bills are proposed to raise the allowances of the members of the National Assembly or to create new positions for legislative aides.Parties were about to make an important entry in the short list of legislations with bipartisan

Editorial March 8, 2011

The Internet and the airwaves are clogged with contradictory predictions of what the Mideast upheavals will mean to the region ― and to us.I have conservative readers calling me an idiot for not understanding that the Egyptian revolution is a huge victory for the Islamists, even as Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., extols the hope for secular democracy in Cairo alongside his buddy, Arizona Republican S

Viewpoints March 8, 2011

“Good-bye Pyongyang,” an 82-minute documentary now showing in cinemas across the country, filmed by a Korean resident in Japan, offers a glimpse of life in the North Korean capital through the eyes of a separated family living in the two countries. Director-producer Yang Yong-hi’s three brothers enjoy relative luxury, with consumer items sent by their parents in Japan over the past 30 years, but w

Editorial March 7, 2011

Controversy over illegal political donations of 200,000 yen (2.7 million won) over four years has further shaken the fragile Naoto Kan administration of the Democratic Party of Japan with the resignation of Foreign Minister Seiji Maehara. As the donor happens to be a Korean restaurant owner in Kyoto named Jang, who says she did not know foreigners were banned from political donations, some may be

Editorial March 7, 2011

Preliminary findings in the 2010 census released Feb. 25 by the internal affairs ministry underline the overall trend of a shrinking and graying population as well as a demographic imbalance characterized by a population rise in a few prefectures and a population drop in most prefectures. Japan cannot lose any time in working out policies that will effectively cope with undesirable effects from th

Viewpoints March 7, 2011

It didn’t take long for well-meaning members of Congress last week to come up with an easy sounding proposal to help the Libyan opposition topple Moammar Gadhafi: Just impose a no-fly zone.“We spend $500 billion on defense and we can’t take down Libyan air defenses?” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., told the Washington Post. “You tell those Libyan pilots that there is a no-fly zone, and they are not goi

Viewpoints March 7, 2011

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page told a riveting story Wednesday about parents in Compton, California, who are trying to stage a revolution in their local school, one of the worst in the city. They’re wielding a new “parent trigger” law in the state to force out the administrators and bring in a charter school operator. They’re learning that parents who put their children first are seen as

Viewpoints March 6, 2011

President Obama has thrown his support behind a bill to let states opt out of key features of the healthcare reform law before they take effect, including the controversial requirement that virtually all adult Americans buy insurance. The caveat, though, is that states must offer alternatives that provide comparable coverage to at least as many of the uninsured as the new law would, at no greater

Viewpoints March 6, 2011

The intellectual roots of the current democracy movement in the Middle East lie with those Muslim thinkers who hold that there is conceptual compatibility between Islam, modernity and democracy. They put stress on concepts such as liberty, human rights and human dignity, freedom of thought, scientific inquiry, contextual interpretation of sharia, the legal principles of the Koran, support for demo

Viewpoints March 6, 2011