All the drama surrounding China’s declaration of a vast “air-defense identification zone” off its shores centers on the disputed islands known as the Senkaku by Japan, which administers them, and the Diaoyu by China, which challenges Tokyo’s claim. The new zone encompasses the airspace over the islands: Beijing wants any planes in the area to identify themselves beforehand or face unspecified, possibly military, action. Japan scoffs at this demand, as does the U.S., which has accused China of un

Don’t look now, but auditions for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination are already under way in Washington. And the flavor of the moment is ― governors.First came Chris Christie, the pugnacious governor of New Jersey, who won reelection by a landslide last month and almost immediately headed to the nation’s capital for a burst of speeches and television appearances.Days later, a less pyrotechnic (but equally combative) chief executive arrived to do the Washington media rounds: Scott Walke

With characteristic concern for coolness over commercial viability, Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos unveiled a new kind of delivery vehicle Sunday night. It’s called an octocopter, and it will fly all by itself, attuned to GPS coordinates, dropping off goods at customers’ doorsteps for same-day delivery.Or at least that’s what Bezos, a consummate PR man, told a wide-eyed Charlie Rose on “60 Minutes.” The octocopter unveiling was masterful publicity, properly hyped and well tim

Technology and revolutionary changes in energy, banking and manufacturing will force a sunset on Western dominance.Several speakers at the Second World Emerging Industries Summit in this central China city on the Yangtze River shared that forecast recently with business, government and university officials from nearly two dozen countries. “Technology creates new possibilities,” said Dominique de Villepin, former prime minister of France.Global dominance will shift to such countries as China, Ind

The Seoul government is set to finalize a plan to expand its air defense identification zone in response to China’s proclamation on Nov. 23 of a new zone that overlaps those of Korea and Japan.China’s new ADIZ is seen as primarily aimed at bolstering its claim to a group of islands in the East China Sea, called Senkaku in Japan and Diaoyu in China. The islands are under Japan’s control, but China also claims sovereignty over them.The problem is that China’s new defense perimeter also includes Ie

Why is there no mechanism in the Korean Constitution for dissolving the National Assembly? So wondered former Prime Minister Kim Whang-sik recently, asserting that such a mechanism would be useful to resolve the current political stalemate.Opposition lawmakers denounced Kim, who also served as a Supreme Court justice, for making the reckless comment. They asked if he wanted to go back to the era of dictatorship, when the president could dissolve the Assembly at will.Of course, Kim did not mean a

WASHINGTON ― As al-Qaida grows more powerful in Syria ― seeking “complete control over the liberated areas,” according to a new Syrian rebel intelligence report ― moderate opposition leaders are voicing new interest in a political settlement of the grinding civil war. But a peace agreement may just be a prelude to a new war against the terrorists. This search for a political transition has also drawn together a disparate group of nations, including Iran, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the United State

Here’s some holiday cheer: 120 million American families no longer have to file income tax returns; the top individual rate is lowered by 20 percent; the top corporate rate is cut by more than half; the government gets the same amount of revenue; and the tax system is slightly more progressive.OK, it’s not a free lunch. It would be accompanied by a 12.9 percent value-added levy, which critics like to call a national sales tax.This is the brainchild of Michael Graetz, a Columbia University law pr

Two years ago, Doreen Flynn of Lewiston, Maine, won her case against the U.S. government, successfully arguing that bone-marrow donors should be able to receive compensation.Flynn, a mother of three girls who are afflicted with a rare, hereditary blood disease called Fanconi’s anemia, has a strong interest in bone-marrow transplantation. At the time of the court ruling, her oldest daughter, Jordan, 14, had already received a transplant, and one of the younger twins, Jorja, was expected to need o

From reading the New York Times, you might think that religious conservatives had started a culture war over whether company health-insurance plans should cover contraception. What’s at issue in two cases the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear, the Times editorializes, is “the assertion by private businesses and their owners of an unprecedented right to impose the owners’ religious views on workers who do not share them.”That way of looking at the issue will be persuasive if your memory does

In poor and middle-income countries, a lethal malady once prominent mainly in affluent parts of the globe is raising its ugly head. Cancer incidence rates are increasing at double that of the rest of the world.Especially alarming are the fatality data. As Jason Gale reports in the December issue of Bloomberg Markets magazine, while developing countries account for about half of new cancer cases, they have about 70 percent of cancer deaths.Lack of access to the latest diagnostic technology and ch

MUNICH ― More than 10 weeks after its general election, Germany continues to be without a new government. But, though the post-election coalition negotiations have been unusually prolonged, there is little disagreement between the parties over foreign and security policy.Indeed, when Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party finally presented their coalition agreement on Nov. 27, the working group on foreign and security policy had been finished with i

Thanks to ever-improving technology for intercepting phone calls and text messages, it’s getting easier for U.S. companies’ competitors, both foreign and domestic, to engage in corporate espionage through remote wiretapping. Such activity, which has been widespread in India for years, could be thwarted if U.S. wireless carriers would upgrade their network infrastructure and encryption practices.However, the federal authorities who are in a position to require this seem more interested in keeping

BERKELEY, California ― Before 2008, I taught my students that the United States was a flexible economy. It had employers who were willing to gamble and hire when they saw unemployed workers who would be productive; and it had workers who were willing to move to opportunity, or to try something new in order to get a job. As bosses and entrepreneurial workers took a chance, supply would create its own demand.Yes, I used to say, adverse shocks to spending could indeed create mass unemployment and i

If the U.S. is currently ruled by stalemate ― with polarized parties crippling its Founders’ checks and balances ― Germany has too much uniformity and too little contest, which is the lifeblood of democracy.Consider the numbers in last week’s deal creating a new “grand coalition” government. Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, who once billed themselves as conservatives, and the Social Democrats, left of center, will control almost 80 percent of the seats in the German parliament. Im

Imagine Thanksgiving 2014: Travel is a breeze. There isn’t a cloud in the sky. The glut of American oil has prompted an unprecedented decline in airfares.As an experienced traveler, you’re tucked away happily in a window seat toward the front of the plane. Your bag fits neatly in the overhead bin. With the skill of a great actor, you have mastered the “don’t say a word to me” vibe. When your seatmate arrives, you look forward, or down at a book, or maybe even at your smartphone. (More on that in

Being 50 minutes late for his first meeting with Pope Francis was nothing unusual for Russian President Vladimir Putin. That‘s just the way he is ― a character trait that provides some insight into his attitude toward power.When Putin arrived on time to an audience with Pope John Paul II in 2003, the punctuality was considered a newsworthy aberration: “The President Was Not Even a Second Late,” read the headline in the newspaper Izvestia. He had been 15 minutes late for a similar audience in 200

WASHINGTON ― Now that the Obama administration has won its breakthrough first-step nuclear deal with Iran, officials are planning strategy for the decisive second round that over the next six months will seek a broader and tougher comprehensive agreement. This “end state” negotiation, as officials describe it, promises to be more difficult because the U.S. and its negotiating partners will seek to dismantle parts of the Iranian program, rather than simply freeze them. Another complication is tha

The Communist Party summit that recast Xi Jinping as a reformer extraordinaire has produced its first foreign-policy initiative: poking Japan in the eye. That seems to be the point of China’s declaration of a vast “air defense identification zone,” in which Beijing has essentially claimed the airspace around disputed islands administered by Japan. The provocation came just two weeks after the party called for a new national security council to coordinate military, domestic and intelligence opera

NEW YORK ― Tacloban in the Philippines has now joined the growing list of cities ― including New Orleans, Bangkok, Moscow, New York, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, and Port-au-Prince, to name just a few ― pummeled in recent years by climate catastrophes. Many of the world’s largest cities, built on seacoasts and rivers, face the threat of rising sea levels and intensifying storms. So the new global development agenda now taking shape should empower cities to help lead the way to sustainable developmen