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

Chinese officials have certainly been busy.

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.

The first challenge is corruption,” Ambassador Bernard Bajolet, representative of France to Afghanistan, stated as he completes this assignment and prepares to return to Paris for another post. Diplomats are generally paid to be discreet, polished and smooth — in short, diplomatic.

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.

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.