On 13 April (14 April East Asian time), Claude Heller, the Mexican president of the United Nations Security Council, read a “Statement” on behalf of the Council. He condemned North Korea for something described as a “launch” it had conducted on 5 April, demanded it desist from any further such act, reaffirmed the principles of a 2006 Security Council resolution (No 1718, adopted in the wake of North Korea's missile and nuclear tests of 2006, banning any “missile-related activity”), directed the UN Sanctions Monitoring Committee to take further steps to secure compliance and to advise on possibly widening the sanctions list, and called for early resumption of the Beijing Six Party negotiations on the North Korean problem.

This article examines US bombing of civilians—the logic, the technology, the consequences—from World War II through the Korean War, the Indochinese Wars.

Airpower embodies American technology at its most dashing. At regular intervals, the air force and allied technocrats claim that innovations in air technology herald an entirely new age of warfare. Korea and Vietnam were, so to speak, living laboratories for the development of new weapons: the 1,200-pound radio-guided Tarzon bomb (featured in Korean-era Movietone newsreels); white-phosphorous-enhanced napalm; cluster bombs (CBUs) carrying up to 700 bomblets, each bomblet containing 200 to 300 tiny steel balls or fiberglass fléchettes; delayed-fuse cluster bombs; airburst cluster bombs; toxic defoliants; varieties of nerve gas; sets of six B 52s, operating at altitudes too high to be heard on the ground, capable of delivering up to thirty tons of explosives each.

Do the economic policies or the “business model” adopted by China and India necessarily aggravate inequalities in income and wealth distribution, and thus exacerbate social contradictions? While not providing a definitive answer, the article examines a wide range of quantitative data on wealth, poverty and inequality in the two counties, noting the rising concentration of income and wealth, the trends in poverty, inequality, employment and unemployment, and the nature and extent of social unrest. It also, however poses methodological issues including the comparability of Chinese, Indian and international data. The author outlines a feasible alternative centred on development with equity.

The prisoner of war (POW) issue is one of the major pillars of Japan's postwar diplomacy. Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration, which stipulated in Annex II (b) (10) that “stern justice shall be meted out to all war criminals, including those who have visited cruelties upon our prisoners.” In addition, it was Prime Minister Yoshida Shigeru, the grandfather of Prime Minister Aso Taro, who signed the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Article 16 of the treaty required Japan to join the Geneva Convention that codified the treatment of prisoners of war.

I think the Constitution of Japan is well formulated. The preamble starts out saying that we pledge perpetual peace: we are “resolved that never again shall we be visited with the horrors of war through the action of government.”

And, rather than defining peace just in this narrow sense, it goes on to say “all peoples of the world have the right to live in peace, free from fear and want.” This means that it advocates “the right to live in peace,” while apparently holding within this vision poverty and starvation, disaster and disease, or various kinds of gaps as factors leading to social disintegration and conflicts.