Iran Crashes OPEC Party, Counting on Sanctions Relief

As Japan shifts from nuclear power to natural gas, the country hopes to regain energy independence by leveraging its potentially significant deposits of methane hydrates. Tokyo is investing considerable resources in finding ways to harness the energy stored within this “fire ice.”

With all the attention of media and government centered on the Geneva agreement between world powers and Iran, other important developments in the Middle East tend to be overlooked. In Turkey, the Erdogan government’s foreign policies are in tatters and the prime minister is making domestic policy decisions that appear on the surface to be inexplicable.

North Korean officials released a video last weekend depicting an American veteran coerced into confessing “crimes” he committed during the Korean War. Merrill Newman, an 85-year-old retired bank executive from California, ran covert operations against Pyongyang, where he armed anti-communist guerrillas. He was arrested while traveling through North Korea early this fall and detained for more than a month. While the international agenda has been dominated by Iran and Sino-Japanese tensions, North Korea has been seizing this opportunity to grab the spotlight on the world stage.

Large-scale foreign aid efforts led by the West are borderline dysfunctional, while entrepreneur-centered lending scaled to individuals has brought families out of poverty with notable efficiency. Building over years of work, this quiet revolution in finance is starting to gain the traction reformers need to rein in failing global aid bureaucracies.

China’s sudden announcement on Nov. 23 that it is establishing an air defense identification zone in the East China Sea is a landmark development in the world security system. It changes the existing geopolitical ethos, alliance patterns and military balance in a region where the world’s top three economies – the United States, China and Japan – are intrinsically linked.