Although U.S. President Barack Obama has never set foot there, China cast a long shadow in the Pacific region where he grew up.

U.S. President Barack Obama begins an Asian trip next week that will take him to Japan, Singapore, China and South Korea. This is a welcome sign of a renewed American emphasis on East Asia.

China's reluctance to let markets play a freer hand in setting the value of the yuan, also called the renminbi, is a festering irritant that both the United States and China want to keep from getting out of hand.

It's a rum world when your definition of “getting better” is “not getting any worse.” That though is the cheering view of many CEOs from the world's top airlines.

The Berlin Wall that came down 20 years ago this month was an apt symbol of communism. It represented a historically unprecedented effort to prevent people from “voting with their feet” and leaving a society they rejected.

A promise by North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il to improve the state's broken economy is forcing him to ask for massive aid and may even bring him back to nuclear talks that Pyongyang once declared dead.

Japan and the United States remain divided over a range of security issues ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama's first visit to Tokyo as leader next week, fueling concerns about their half-century old alliance.

If Western leaders were still puzzling over Iran's approach to nuclear talks, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad offered a timely tutorial.

President Hamid Karzai's leadership is weak, his government corrupt and nearly a third of the votes he won in the August election were thrown out as fakes.

In the ideal world of economics, firms that take excessive risks go bankrupt, their competitors pick up the pieces and the economy marches on. Some call it “creative destruction.”