With its resources boom coming to an end, the good times in Australia cannot last. But while economists blame China's economic slowdown and politicians blame one another, it is perhaps time to ask whether Australia might have brought some of the coming hardship on itself.

The first task for Prime Minister Najib Razak is to form the Cabinet. And we can expect the process to be different this time.

The latest and most controversial speech of Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra about democracy in Mongolia last week has led to an impact beyond her expectation.

Mt. Fuji, which has been adored as a symbol of Japanese culture since ancient times, will most likely be registered as a World Cultural Heritage Site.

It doesn't take a new-media expert to say it — everybody knows that social media cut both ways. But Hernando Rojas should be credited for taking on the technological darling of the hour fearlessly. Speaking at a lecture organized by the Thai Journalists Association a few days ago, he basically said that few things inflame an ideological divide better than the social-connection tools at our disposal nowadays.

The withdrawal from the industrial complex in North Korea's border town of Kaeseong has been completed, with the seven remaining South Koreans having returned home and US$13 million in back pay and severance pay having been delivered to the North on Friday. Now there is no predicting what will become of the industrial complex, where small South Korean manufacturers have operated for the past decade.

I teach a 50-minute English class every Friday afternoon this semester at a public high school just down the road from my house. As I enter the campus there, I swing to the left, walk down a long corridor with a courtyard by the side, and then climb the stairs to the fourth floor. As I approach my classroom there, I see a mural on the wall.

The noise and fury of rhetoric from the North of the Korean Peninsula has been much. It has cooled a little of late, but in the weeks that followed U.N. sanctions against North Korea for their third nuclear weapons test, it was odd to pass a day without heralds of fire.

The United States intelligence community is still rushing to piece together the evidence related to the planning and execution of the Boston Marathon bombings. But a parallel and equally energetic investigation is sorely needed into the spectacular role online social media played during that crisis.

It was past 4 p.m. when Najib Razak arrived at SJKC Chung Hua 2 in Kuching for his fourth program of the day.