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.

There is a nuclear reprocessing plant in the village of Rokkasho in the prefecture of Aomori at the northern tip of Honshu, Japan's largest island. Capable of putting out 9 tons of weapons-grade plutonium and 800 tons of uranium a year, it is due to complete active tests — the last stage before it starts commercial operation.

The hard-line Sunni Muslim cleric may have been defeated at polls five years ago, but he's confident of winning a seat in Pakistan's election on Saturday, furthering his bid to oppress Shiites.

In any civil war, accusations fly. Given the political pedigree of the Assad family dictatorship, and the fact that their security forces possess large quantities of chemical weapons, (stockpiles with Soviet origin), this comes as no surprise.

The anti-European Union UK Independence Party made big gains in local elections on Friday, siphoning support from British Prime Minister David Cameron's Conservatives in a vote that underlined the threat it poses to his re-election chances in 2015.

The U.S. economy showed last month why it remains the envy of industrialized nations: In the face of tax increases and federal spending cuts, employers added a solid 165,000 jobs in April — and far more in February and March than anyone thought.

The success of an anti-Europe party once dismissed as “fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists” by Prime Minister David Cameron dealt a blow to his Conservative party on Friday, producing the best results in local elections of any fourth party in Britain since World War II.