It would take most of us a few dozen lifetimes to amass 2 million followers on Twitter. And yet Charlie Sheen managed it in less than a week. Last month, CBS Corp. discontinued the hit comedy show “Two and a Half Men” after Sheen’s public jousting with senior management over a binge that the wild-man actor has described as “epic” and “radical.” Since then, he has become one of the biggest names ...

Japan’s relations with its immediate neighbors have taken a drastic dip in recent times. One major problem is the disputed territorial claims that Japan faces with China, South Korea and Russia. Japan controls Senkaku Islands (Diaoyutai in Chinese), a chain of islands also claimed by China and Taiwan. In early September 2010, Japanese patrol boats clashed with a Chinese fishing trawler near the ...

The 2012 presidential campaign is finally stirring to life, with would-be Republican candidates Haley Barbour and Mike Huckabee musing about whether Mitt Romney should be disqualified by similarities between Massachusetts’ Romneycare and Obamacare. As if on cue, President Barack Obama defended his health care overhaul in remarks to the nation’s governors by associating it with Romney’s, an embra...

LOS ANGELES ― A new analysis of survey data compiled by the National Endowment for the Arts since 1982 shows that blacks and Latinos have suffered from a collapse in arts education, and that their young-adult rates of arts attendance have declined far more than for whites. Childhood arts education “has played a vital role ... in developing a potential audience” for the arts, the researchers from...

The Korean Peninsula is experiencing its most "dangerous" period since the end of the 1950-53 Korean War in light of North Korean provocations last year, an international military report showed Wednesday. The 2011 edition of the annual Military Balance, published by the London-based think tank International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), said international tensions rose across the wor...

South Korea has seen a dramatic rise in suicides of economically strapped elderly people over the last two decades, a study revealed Wednesday, calling public attention to the dark aspects of the nation's rapidly aging society. The suicide ratio for those aged over 65 jumped to 77 per 100,000 population in 2009, an over five-fold surge from 14 recorded in 1990, according to Hallym University's...