When historians of the future look back on 2007 from a decade or so down the road, what will they single out as the years big China story? Theyll certainly have plenty of options to choose from, since the international press has carried a dizzyingly wide range of China headlines lately, dealing with everything from toy recalls to carbon emissions, space exploration to currency controls, Beijings Olympic preparations to Pudong getting the worlds tallest skyscraper.

Kevin Rudd, Australias new Labor prime minister, last week lived up to his campaign pledge to reverse his Liberal predecessors decision to sell Australian uranium ore to India.

A joke is making the rounds in Burma, where dramatic political instability has pitted a repressive regime against protesting Buddhist monks. It speaks of the five great enemies of mankind: water, fire, the king, the thief, and a person who bears ill will towards another. The joke adds this: Now we have only three enemies left, since the king, the thief and the one who bears ill will towards another are the same.

How important is private property to the idea of freedom? Since the dawn of time, intellectuals have imagined a world in which all things are commonly owned and people achieve perfect freedom. In fact, this is sheer fantasy, and a dangerous one at that. There is no such thing as freedom in a world in which property is not privately owned and controlled.

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Pressure is mounting on Pakistans President Pervez Musharraf to come to some agreement with the countrys main political parties. The opposition Pakistan Peoples Party, led by Benazir Bhutto, has threatened to boycott the upcoming January elections if the current state of emergency isnt lifted soon.

As Pakistan moves towards elections less than a month away, it is still unclear which party or set of parties will be able to form a government at the center.

What is Yasuo Fukuda, Japans latest prime minister, supposed to do about Kim Jong Il and the ongoing abduction issue? Many PMs before him have tried and failed to resolve the issue of Pyongyangs kidnapping of Japanese citizens in the 1970s and 80s.

Just about every article written in the past few years about Japans growing role in international security matters featured as evidence its dispatch of Self-Defense Forces (SDF) to support multilateral operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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