In today's pages

Historian Mark Kurlansky remembers the world's outrage at the bombing of Guernica seventy years ago today:

Two days after the attack, London Times correspondent George Steer's eyewitness account was published in the London Times and the New York Times, and the world responded with outrage at this new type of warfare — randomly attacking civilians from the air on a large scale. It was widely seen as a crime that should never be allowed to happen again....

But 70 years after Guernica — after the bombings of Coventry, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, Hue, Beirut and Baghdad — it has become clear that modern war is fought from the air and that the greatest number of casualties are civilians.

English professor Drew Limsky discusses a smaller-scale crime that also inspired art — a suburban California murder captured in Joan Didion's "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream" — and compares it to last weekend's murder at the Montage resort at Laguna Beach. Aaron Friedberg and Dan Blumenthal explore the U.S. alliance with Japan on the day of Prime Minister Abe Shinzo's visit, while William Ury has hope for reconciliation between grocery chains and unions.

The editorial board doesn't like secret jurors, even if they're hearing the high-profile Phil Spector case, nor does it like giving human drugs to beef cattle. The board also applauds Mexico City for giving women abortion rights, despite the country's strong religious sensibility and strict laws.

On the letters page, there's support for George McGovern, for 1972 and 2008, memories of writer David Halberstam, and there's skepticism that global warming makes other environmental issues irrelevant. J.W. Miller says that human population growth is the biggest problem, and would trade saving the whales for turning them into sushi.