With Arafat just having kicked the bucket, you might miss the breaking story that Iris Chang, 
author of several books on the Asian-American immigrant experience and most famously The Rape of Nanking, was found dead in her car, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. She had recently been hospitalized for a nervous breakdown and the cause of her suicide was apparently depression, but this is a forehead-in-palm moment that makes you really wonder “WHY??” She was married and had a two-year old son. She was an incredibly successful journalist at the top of her field. My condolences to her family.
Full disclosure: I’ve long been very, very critical of Ms. Chang’s style and her near-narcisit attack on Japan in her aforementioned bestseller. But this isn’t something to celebrate.
The posts on Japan Times were typical in their comments, saying she exposed the truth about Japan’s war crimes in China. But somewhere, Kobayashi Yoshinori is laughing.
She probably realized that her books were propaganda not journalism and she couldnt get a job anymore because everyone knew. She wanted to make it interested not right. Maybe she was threatened with being exposed as the fraud she really was.