Seventy years ago this month the Pacific War of World War II ended, and the Atomic Age began. First off this week, F&O focuses on the war, and continuing aftermath: Japanese Remorse: Once More With Feeling, by Jonathan Manthorpe (*subscription) Japan’s current Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is having another crack on August 15, the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War in the Pacific, at finally drawing a line under the country’s imperial past.  European Scientists and Yankee Managers build ‘The Bomb,’ by Jim McNiven (*subscription) A week short of a year after America’s entry into World War II,

Context is everything: facts or opinions rarely stand strong by themselves. Take, for example, F&O columnist Jonathan Manthorpe’s column in May, about Vancouver real estate and corrupt money from mainland China. The Vacuously Vain column went “viral,” boosted by mentions from the Economist to academic urban planning journals to online media in Oz. It’s our best-read story since we launched in 2013; it helped that Manthorpe left the column outside our paywall,* because we’ve found that very few people will pay even a dollar to pass our paywall and support our journalism. But the reason this piece hit a nerve

The stories that mattered to us this week range from the passing of EL Doctorow to invasions — the army of King Crabs descending on Antarctica and the British invasion of American pop. We feature a photographer’s view of the Tour de France, and an expert examination of how American psychologists colluded in torture. F&O International Affairs analyst Jonathan Manthorpe casts his mind forward to the election approaching in Taiwan’s precarious democracy, while F&O columnist Tom Regan looks at the man with the toupee who aspires to be America’s next president. Brian Brennan’s rather quirky Brief Encounter this week is