Asia & Pacific
Nowhere to be Home

Nowhere to be Home

When I was in the army, I thought the guerillas were trying to break my country, to destroy my country—this is how I used to think. Not now, now I’m not the same. I don’t know why people join the military. As for myself, I was forced to be a soldier. If I had stayed with my family, I would not have been a soldier. I think the army takes children because they need to strengthen their forces, increase the number of soldiers. I think there is a reward for each soldier who catches a child. Any time a soldier recruits someone to join the force, they get a lot of money. Older soldiers told me that if they recruit someone, then they can quit the army.

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Nuclear Energy Time-Out

Nuclear Energy Time-Out

Sometimes chaos comes along as a wake-up call to humanity. The double-whammy of the earthquake-tsunami in Japan this week is overwhelmingly sad. To be at the total whim of the elements — to be wiped out by a wave of water from the sea – is an insult to the arrogance of modern humanity that thinks it can insulate and protect itself with technological know-how from the calamities visited on our earth by Mother Nature. 

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Hatoyama’s Confession

Nine months after stepping down as Prime Minister, Yukio Hatoyama conceded that he had just given “deterrence” as the factor necessitating retention of the US Marine Corps on Okinawa because he needed a pretext.

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