The Londoner

Washington faced a 3 AM moment a few months ago when it learned about the assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and the murder of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and the other Americans who were with him. This was not the first one, of course, nor will it be the last. I was introduced to the idea of the 3 AM moment in 2001, when I was undergoing the two-week training session on embassy leadership in preparation for becoming the U.S. ambassador to Singapore. One of the exercises involved something of a trick question: What is the most important article of clothing for an ambassador? Is it white tails, for state weddings and funerals? Perhaps black tails, for formal dances and banquets? Maybe even an ordinary business suit for ministry calls? In fact, the answer was pajamas and a bathrobe. Simply put, most every ambassador eventually finds himself or herself managing a crisis from the ambassador's residence at 3 AM. Best to have some good PJs and a respectable ro

When South Korea and the United States amended their missile guidelines last month after years of tough negotiations, China and other countries expressed some concerns about the revisions, the first change in the guidelines in more than a decade. Shedding some light on the reasons for the decision might help assuage them. Under a 2001 accord with Washington, Seoul agreed not to deploy ballistic missiles having a range of more than 300 km or a payload of more than 500 kg. Under the new guidelines, South Korea can now possess ballistic missiles with a range up to 800 kilometers with a higher maximum payload of 500 kilograms. The payloads can be even heavier for missiles with shorter ranges. The agreement also permits the ROK to operate drone aircraft having a range of 300 km with payloads up to 2,500 kilograms as well as shorter-range UAVs with no restrictions on their payloads. South Korean officials offered several reasons for the revised guidelines. The most co

North Korea said it would carry out its second rocket launch of 2012 as its youthful leader Kim Jong-un flexes his muscles a year after his father's death, in a move that South Korea and the United States swiftly condemned as a provocation. North Korea's state news agency announced the decision to launch another space satellite on Saturday, just a day after Kim met a senior delegation from China's Communist Party in the North Korean capital of Pyongyang. China , under new leadership, is North Korea's only major political backer and has continually urged peace on the Korean peninsula, where the North and South remain technically at war after an armistice, rather than a peace treaty, ended the 1950-53 conflict. China's Foreign Ministry said it was deeply concerned by the move, but urged calm. "North Korea has a right to the peaceful use of space, but this right has been restricted by U.N. Security Council

The Meiji Restoration Era, 1868-1889 by James Huffman , April 21, 2008 Editor's Note: This article was originally written for Japan Society's previous site for educators, "Journey through Japan," in 2003. Change was the currency of the Meiji era (1868–1912). From the day the teen-aged Mutsuhito claimed power on January 3, 1868 in a relatively tranquil coup called the “Meiji Restoration” (after his reign name) until his death forty-five years later, Japan experienced an evolution so rapid that one Tokyo expatriate said he felt as if he had been alive for 400 years. An isolated, feudalistic island state in 1850, Japan had become a powerful colonial power with the most modern of institutions when Meiji’s son, the Taisho emperor, took the throne in 1912. Both the sources of these changes and the way in which they made Japan “modern” provide the material for one of human history’s more dramatic stories. They also laid the groundwork fo