After weeks of signs that the DPJ might wholly embrace the foreign policy status quo, Yukio Hatoyama announced on Wednesday that, when the current special measures law for the deployment of Maritime Self-Defense Forces (MSDF) refueling ships in the Indian Ocean in support of coalition activities in Afghanistan expires in January, a DPJ-led government would not extend the mission or draft a new law...

At a poorly organized press conference at LDP headquarters Friday evening, the LDP released its manifesto for the 2009 general election...

Perhaps it was the newspaper gene in me that made me screech my car to a halt when I saw a near riot in progress at my local total Toyota dealer...

Ever watch a scary movie and think, how are zombies able to get so far into buildings and chase people despite being slow and brain-dead?

One policy area that could see cooperation between a DPJ-led government and the JCP (and the SDPJ) is the treatment of non-regular workers (mentioned here)...

In the last analysis a healthy state can exist only when the men and women who make it up lead clean, vigorous, healthy lives; when the children are so trained that they shall endeavor, not to shirk difficulties, but to overcome them; not to seek ease, but to know how to wrest triumph from toil and risk...

Fortune magazine ran an excellent article about the flood of institutional money pouring into agricultural land, a sector I have been harping on for some time (see earlier piece)...

Moribund conditions persist

Yoshimi Watanabe, the onetime cabinet minister who left the LDP earlier this year to form a reformist "third force" with independent Kenji Eda, is still preparing to launch a new party before next month's general election...

Beautiful as France is, it's ski resorts are filled with pesky, queue-barging coquins with all their attendant bad manners, trampling upon one's skiis, and mayhem creation...