After a U.S. senator was shot on Fox's drama “24” this year, another character blurted out the make and model of the assassin's submachine gun.

As a founder of Human Rights Watch, Robert L. Bernstein is a distinguished moral voice. So he stunned the human rights community last week when he leveled a devastating attack on the work of the organization he chaired for two decades.

Twenty years after the Berlin Wall fell, now unified Germany has a far bigger footprint on the world stage, demonstrating an assertiveness that was unthinkable for most of the post-Nazi period.

Describing the human rights situation in North Korea as “dismal,” a U.N. report outlined abuses in the communist country where people were deprived of essential freedoms “from the right to feed themselves to the right to be rid of fear, to the right of free expression.”

The government wants financial companies, not taxpayers, to pay the tab for too-big-to-fail firms that run into trouble. As good as that sounds, it may not work.

The biggest U.S. business organization has fallen out with influential parts of Corporate America because of its trenchant opposition to climate-change legislation making its way through Congress.

Farming, which many city folk once associated primarily with children's books and distinctive if not entirely flattering tan lines, is suddenly in vogue.

It's as provocative an argument as an economist can make: China is stealing jobs. Paul Krugman did it on Oct. 22, raising blood-pressure levels around Beijing.

Tokyo and Washington are struggling to keep a feud over a U.S. military base from spoiling President Barack Obama's visit next month, but assuaging mutual anxiety as both allies adapt to China's growing clout will be an even harder task.

China's busy climate change diplomacy has become increasingly feverish weeks before crucial talks that could forge a new pact to fight global warming, or end in rancor that could rebound onto the world's biggest emitter.