Since the 1960s, television has been a fixture of the Japanese household, and NHK's TV news has until very recently been the dominant, and most trusted, source of political information for the Japanese citizen. NHK's news style is distinctive among the broadcasting systems of industrialized countries; it emphasizes facts over interpretation and gives unusual priority to coverage of the national bureaucracy. In his talk, Krauss will argue that this approach is not simply a reflection of Japanese culture, but a result of the organization and processes of NHK and their relationship with the state. These factors had profound consequences for the state's postwar re-legitimization, while the commercial networks' recent challenge to NHK has helped engender the wave of cynicism currently faced by the state. Professor Krauss is a leading expert on Japanese Politics, U.S.-Japan relations, and Japan's political economy. He also is the director of the International Career Associates Program (ICAP) at IR/PS. His most recent book, Broadcasting Politics in Japan: NHK and Television News (Cornell University Press, 2000), discusses Japan's mammoth public broadcaster, and its relationship to and consequences for politics. He recently received a prestigious Abe Fellowship to conduct research on Japanese foreign policy decision making in APEC and its impact on U.S.-Japan relations. Krauss is co-editor of Media and Politics in Japan and has co-edited and written contributing articles for Democracy in Japan and Conflict in Japan. He wrote a monograph for the Foreign Policy Association, entitled Japan's Democracy: How Much Change? and has authored many articles in professional journals of political science and Asian studies.

On January 1 Sweden assumed the rotating chairmanship of the European Union. While serving as the Swedish EU Commissioner from 1995 to 1999, Gradin was in charge of immigration, home affairs and justice. She will discuss Sweden's priorities for the EU, and the results of the December EU summit in Nice, France, with its associated Treaty of Nice. Gradin has a distinguished career: she was Vice-Chair of the national Federation of Social Democratic Women in Sweden, Chair of the Council of Europe's Committee on Migration, Refugees and Demography, and Minister with responsibility for immigrant and equality affairs at the Ministry of Labor (1982-86). From 1968 to 1992 she was a member of Parliament and a member of the parliamentary Standing Committees on Education and on Finance, as well as a delegate to the Council of Europe. From 1986 to 1991 Gradin was Minister with responsibility for foreign trade at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, and from 1992-94 she was Sweden's ambassador to Austria and Slovenia and to IAEA and UN in Vienna.

S.B. Woo is a physicist and former Lieutenant Governor of Delaware. He was born in Shanghai, China, and came to the United States from Hong Kong at the age of eighteen. He received his B.S., summa cum laude, in mathematics and physics from Georgetown College in Kentucky and his Ph. D. in physics from Washington University in St. Louis in 1964. His other experiences include being trustee of the University of Delaware, an Institute Fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. As OCA's (Organization of Chinese Americans) National President in 1991, his vision was to help make the Asian- American an equal partner in the making of the American Dream. After politics, Dr. Woo returned to University of Delaware to teach Physics. He enjoys greatly using the methodology of physics to do research in economics, education and national technology policy. He is currently working on a project called The 80-20 Initiative.

Prof. Panikkar will address the relationship of history to issues of power, politics, and censorship in the context of the recent controversy involving the withdrawal of two volumes on modern history by the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR).

Prof. K. N. Panikkar teaches at the Centre for Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. He is the Chairman of the Archives on Contemporary History and formerly the Dean of the School of Social Sciences, JNU. He is associated with several universities and institutions in India and abroad. He has been the President of the Modern History Section of the Indian History Congress and a member of the Indian Council for Social Science Research and the Indian Council for Historical Research. He has also been a member of several academic and research organizations and a visiting professor to universities abroad.

Prof. Panikkar's main area of current research is intellectual-cultural history of modern Indian on which he has written extensively. His publications include, Culture, Ideology and Hegemony--Intellectuals and Social Consciousness in Colonial India; Culture and Consciousness in Modern India; Against Lord and State--Religion and Peasant Uprisings in Malabar; Communal Threat, Secular Challenge and British Diplomacy in North India. Among the books he has edited the latest is The Concerned Indian's Guide to Communalism.