The Philippines sent a special envoy to Taipei on Monday to explain away a misunderstanding in regard to its deportation of 14 Taiwanese nationals to China rather than Taiwan for trial on fraud charges. Manuel Roxas, a former senator and confidant of Filipino President Benigno Aquino III, refused to apologize on Wednesday for what Manila calls a regrettable incident. It all started right after 2...

As CD sales plummeted, music executives looked in hope toward a new business model: Instead of trying to sell albums for $15 to $20 apiece, offer unlimited access to songs online for a flat monthly fee. The idea, however, has yet to catch on with the masses of music fans. The main impediment for many years was that subscribers couldn’t use the services on the MP3 players that most of them owned, ...

Every serious global problem has an important China angle. The Chinese are everywhere, and they’re not going away any time soon. As a matter of fact, the Chinese are firmly convinced that this is “their” century, and that they will displace the United States as global economic leader. The last country with a dominant global economic role that had to face a boisterous, fast-growing upstart was B...

The result in Hamburg couldn’t have been more punishing for the Christian Democratic Union and for Chancellor Angela Merkel. The first of seven regional elections in Germany this year left no doubt about where German voters stand on a much larger issue: the euro crisis. The race for mayor of the city-state, the equivalent of the premier in other German states, was won by the candidate from the o...

Our country is bankrupt. It’s not bankrupt in 30 years or five years. It’s bankrupt today. Want proof? Look at President Barack Obama’s 2010 budget. It showed a massive fiscal gap over the next 75 years, the closure of which requires immediate tax increases, spending cuts, or some combination totaling 8 percent of gross domestic product. To put 8 percent of GDP in perspective, this year’s employ...

It’s good to see the boys of summer back on the baseball field. It will be even better if more players take the field without a pinch of chewing tobacco tucked under their lower lips. Sure, that puffed-out jaw of Lenny “Nails” Dykstra will live in the memory of every Philadelphia Phillies’ fan who ever watched him tear up the base paths. And ballplayers’ chewing habit goes back more than a centu...

The expanded Kansai regional alliance, which has the promise of becoming the first such organization to achieve efficient administration beyond prefectural boundaries, is hard at work. In this connection, there is no need to be obsessed with prefectural administrative borders in effect since the Meiji era (1868-1912). Transport conditions and the communications environment have changed drastical...

China has taken giant strides toward economic and social development. This has expedited its transformation from the previous class structure of workers, farmers, cadres and intellectuals to a more complicated one that comprises more classes and groups. To find the best way to handle and coordinate the interests of all classes and groups in today’s changed and pluralistic society and form a vigor...

Investors of the world, unite and buy Australian bank debt. Why? Moody’s Investors Service suggests you shouldn’t. Really, in our post-U.S.-crisis world, is there a better contrarian indicator? Credit raters missed the Asian crisis, Russia’s default, the tech-stock crash, Enron, the U.S. housing bubble, Wall Street’s collapse and Europe’s meltdown. Now, we’re supposed to care what they think abo...

After making a big splash at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington this month, Donald Trump was asked if he is considering a run for the presidency. “I’m incredibly tempted,” he responded. If Trump gives in to temptation, his past actions and positions may collectively provide the biggest handicap for a major candidate in the history of presidential politics. If he decides...