In 1990 Maita Kazuhiko set out to capture some bears. Maita, who now directs the Institute for Asian Black Bear Research and Preservation in Hiroshima Prefecture, had first been drawn to the powerful animals as a college student in the 1960's. At that time he had little interest in conservation, and, simply wanting to study their behaviour, spent two decades after graduating tracking bears for a regional government office in northern Japan, where he was also in charge of handling complaints from local farmers suffering crop damage from the animals. By the 80's, however, it was clear that Japanese black bears (Ursus thibetanus japonicus) were in a state of crisis.

It is probably a cliché to observe that tropical rain forests host the greatest known concentrations of bio-diversity on the planet. Together, the three great global equatorial biozones are central Africa, the Amazon basin, and the Indonesian archipelago, including southern Sumatra Island, and the even more remote tin-rich offshore island of Bangka, as profiled here by Andre Vltchek. Recent understandings also point to these dramatically shrinking forest reserves as carbon soaks and/or as the planet's treasured green lungs.

At a press conference in Seoul last week, Japanese Foreign Minister Okada Katsuya apologized for Japan's harsh occupation of Korea from 1910-1945. “We should remember the agonies of people being ruled and never forget the feelings of victims,” Okada said. The agony currently being remembered most visibly concerns forced labor by Koreans in wartime Japan. Now led by the Democratic Party and seeking greater regional integration, the Japanese government is moving toward a conciliatory approach to this painful colonial legacy.

In what Pyongyang's state media billed as a “military drill,” North Korea on January 28, 2010 fired artillery shells near its disputed border with South Korea. South Korea responded by firing its Vulcan cannons into the air – a sign, according to the South Korean press, that Seoul would not give in to intimidation. The incident made global headlines, even though these skirmishes near the Northern Limit Line dividing the countries in the Yellow Sea, which North Korea does not recognize as a legitimate border, have been ongoing for years. If U.S. President Barack Obama wants to resolve once and for all the situation on the Korean Peninsula, he's going to have to take an innovative approach to solving the underlying problem: pushing at last for a formal end to the Korean War.

Japan marked the 50th anniversary of the Japan-U.S. Security Treaty on January 19 amid calls for an inquiry into the dispatch of Japanese Self-Defence Forces to Iraq, which critics say was illegal and in violation of Japan's no-war Constitution. But in contrast to the fierce debates over the origins and legitimacy of the 2003 Iraq invasion in both the United States and the United Kingdom, public discussion in Japan is muted and there will be no official investigation.