Poor Shinzo Abe. The Japanese prime minister's announcement that he's stepping down marked the end of an ignominious year. His term has been marked by just about every kind of political misfortune you can imagine – corruption scandals, crossed signals, stunning errors in political judgment, and just plain chaos. In the end, though, his fate was determined by the same weakness that has claimed so many illustrious victims before him: support for President George W. Bush and America's war on terror.

 (photo: Reuters)

Wait a minute – wasn't Japan supposed to be one of the few pro-American countries left on the planet? The place where polls consistently show majorities expressing support for U.S. policies?

Well, yeah – but only up to a point.

Yesterday's news that Apple had sold more than a million iPhones in less than three months--after dropping its price by one third to $399 last week--felt pretty anticlimactic. So, Apple's newest most covetable device is flying off the shelves? So what?

Actually, says one of the world's leading Internet security experts, David Perry, who stopped by Newsweek's London office yesterday, the iPhone's record sales are a "very big deal." While we're all thoroughly accustomed to PC viruses--which are now being circulated at the rate of 15,000 per day, compared to just 5 per month in 1990--to date there has yet to be any major cell phone virus.