In today's New York Times, op-ed contributor James Bradley offers a very interesting analysis of Teddy Roosevelt's role in creating the conditions that lead to war in the Pacific during World War II.

According to Bradley, Roosevelt so admired the Japanese that as early as 1900, he expressed a wish to see them take full control of Korea. He also agreed with the argument, popular in Japan at that time, that it should be the nation to lead Asia into the modern world.

Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906 for helping to negotiate the end of the Russo-Japanese War. His pro-Japanese stance may have influenced the proceedings - certainly, Japan came out of the closely-matched fray in better standing than Russia did.

Whether Teddy Roosevelt's beliefs and actions really had a significant impact on Japan's increasingly imperialist goals in the early 20th century is debatable. I don't think that any jury would convict him of causing the attack at Pearl Harbor and the war in the Pacific.

Still, it is an interesting cautionary tale - diplomatic decisions made today can have unforeseen and tragic consequences in the future.

Photo of Teddy Roosevelt by Arnold Genthe / Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Collection.

Twenty-five years ago, on December 3, 1984, a fog of poisonous gas wafted through the sleeping city of Bhopal, India in the early morning hours. The gas was methyl isocyanate, and it seeped from a holding tank at the near-by Union Carbide pesticides factory.

Within days, an estimated 8,000 people were dead, and hundreds of thousands more had been exposed.

Since that time, many more residents of Bhopal have died of chronic illness associated with the poisoning, and thousands of children have been born with severe birth defects. Local people allege that groundwater in the area is still contaminated, as well.

Union Carbide, which was bought by Dow Chemical in 1999, has yet to pay for the death and disabilities it inflicted on Bhopal.

Photo by Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images.

She's famous mostly for shoes - the thousands and thousands of pairs of shoes that were discovered in her closets when her husband, dictator Ferdinand Marcos, was ousted from power by a popular uprising in 1986.

Since that time, Imelda Marcos has kept a relatively low profile. That's about to change, though; she has announced her candidacy for Congress in the upcoming elections in the Philippines.

This should be interesting.

South Korea's Truth and Reconciliation Commission announced last week that early in the Korean War, the South Korean army and police executed thousands of civilians suspected of communist sympathies.

The commission released a list of 4,934 names of victims. Lured to government reeducation programs by the promise of extra food rations, most of them were just poor farmers - not political agitators.

As the North Korean army quickly overran most of South Korea in the first two months of the war, these innocent civilians were massacred by their own government, which feared that they would help the communist invaders.

The families of victims suspect that the actual toll was much higher than the investigation has thus far revealed. Still unanswered, too, is whether President Syngman Rhee himself ordered the killings.