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Richard Halloran

In September, the voters of Scotland are slated to go to the polls to decide whether their nation will become independent or remain in the United Kingdom.

To the Confucian scholar Xunzi, writing in China 2,500 years ago, calling things by the right name was imperative. If things were properly named, he asserted, "there is no longer the danger of people's ideas not being understood". This concept of the "rectification of names" is as applicable today as it was in ancient times.

Something curious is going on in North Korea. The Pyongyang propaganda machine that regularly spews overblown rhetoric in the direction of South Korea, Japan and the US has been strangely silent about the inauguration of President Park Geun-hye in Seoul.

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After a little more than a year of fanfare, President Barack Obama's "pivot" of American political, economic and military attention to Asia and the Pacific seems to be fading. The clues are subtle.