AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
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The Group of 20 finance chiefs seek to avoid "competitive currency devaluation" amid the yen's decline on Prime Minister Abe's drastic monetary easing.
Ito-Yokado and York-Benimaru are the first major supermarkets to begin offering U.S. beef imported since rules were eased on cattle aged 30 months or younger.
On an extraordinary day for the planet, a meteor explodes over Russia with the largest impact in more than a century while a larger space rock barely misses Earth.
Beneath its bellicose rhetoric, China has been quietly bolstering its territorial claims with ancient documents, academic research, maps and technical data.
Breast cancer patients and family members gather in a room on the 10th floor of Tokyo Kyosai Hospital to sit down and share their troubles, while Kaori Osawa, a medical social worker, acts as moderator and answers questions.
Tamagotchi is re-hatching as an app. Bandai Co. and Sync Beatz Entertainment Inc. are hoping to revive the electronic pet craze of the 1990s with a new mobile app that debuted Thursday for Android devices in the U.S. The app duplicates the egg-shaped plastic ...
North Korea is upgrading one of its major missile launch sites, apparently to handle far bigger rockets, and the design features implicate Iran.
A heavy meteor shower rains down on central Russia, sowing panic as the hurtling space debris smashes windows and injures hundreds of people.
Shinzo Abe kicks off a study panel tasked with establishing a Japanese version of the U.S. National Security Council, vowing to enhance the flow of information while consolidating command.
Warren Buffett puts his money in ketchup, agreeing Thursday to buy H.J. Heinz Co. for $23.3 billion in the richest deal ever in the food industry.
The bodies of two of the three Japanese victims of a car and knife rampage in Guam arrived Friday evening at Narita International Airport.
In a first for Japan's judicial system, a man is sentenced to hang for killing a woman even though there was only one victim and he had no prior criminal record.
Yuko Tojo, the granddaughter of executed Class-A war criminal Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, dies of interstitial pneumonia at age 73.
It was only a matter of time. With many of its debt-ridden euro partners in recession, Germany could only swim against the tide for so long. Figures Thursday showed that output in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, contracted by more than anticipated in the final ...
Viktoria Azarenka moves into the quarterfinals of the Qatar Total Open on Thursday night with an overpowering 6-0, 6-0 victory over unseeded American Christina McHale.
Kirin Holdings Co. said its group net profit shot up more than sevenfold in 2012 to ¥56.20 billion due to a sharp fall in special losses as well as a rise in sales. Its special losses plunged from ¥96.68 billion in 2011 to ¥38.89 ...
Prosecutor Gerrie Nel said Friday in court it was premeditated murder, indicating the prosecution would file that more serious charge, upgraded from murder.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency plans to send a space telescope into orbit around the Earth to observe Venus, Mars and Jupiter to unlock the secrets of our own planet’s atmosphere.
The Cabinet Office will introduce legislation to allow the central government to respond more speedily to massive natural disasters, officials said Friday. At a panel meeting of the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, Cabinet Office representatives said the office will submit a bill to the ...
After the ignominy of a premature demise from the Champions League as defending champion, Chelsea’s quest to win the Europa League began by gaining a slender advantage at Sparta Prague on Thursday. On another miserable night for striker Fernando Torres, who has scored once ...
The deadly hostage crisis at an Algerian gas plant seized by Islamist militants last month struck fresh fear into the minds of Japanese workers and their families in India, prompting them to take security precautions. A growing number of Japanese have settled in India, ...
The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected a plea from the Sea Shepherd antiwhaling group to end restrictions on its movements, following Japanese allegations that its activists had violated orders to stay away. Sea Shepherd, which disrupts Japan’s contentious whaling missions in the Southern Ocean, ...
After a rough first period, the New York Islanders came out and played as though they had nothing to lose.
Scandinavian Airlines System has seen its business in Japan recover dramatically since the Great East Japan Earthquake and the upturn is continuing, according to an SAS executive.
The Akita Northern Happinets have terminated forward Dan Fitzgerald’s contract, the bj-league club announced on Friday. The Marquette University product struggled to knock down shots since joining the team in December. Fitzgerald, who drained 146 3-pointers and shot 34.6 percent from beyond the arc ...
The late Etsuko Takano, general manager of Iwanami Hall, a Tokyo movie theater famous for showing foreign art films, played a pioneering role in bringing international masterpieces to the silver screen in Japan before the age of the Internet and cable television. Takano died ...
The government will award a posthumous national honor to the late yokozuna Taiho in recognition of his historic sumo victory record, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Friday. Taiho, who died last month of heart disease at 72, “left glorious achievements as a great ...
Two Somali men convicted of attempting to hijack an oil tanker operated by a Japanese company in the Arabian Sea in 2011 have appealed the 10-year prison term they were given this month, court officials said Friday. Mohamed Urgus Adeysey and Abdinur Hussein Ali, ...
Twelve years ago, Ami Kifushi was a sixth-grader at Ikeda Elementary School in Osaka Prefecture when a knife-wielding intruder entered the premises, killed eight students and wounded several others. Next month, Kifushi, 23, will graduate from Mie University with a bachelor’s degree in education. ...
Lakers owner Jerry Buss has been hospitalized with cancer, the Los Angeles Times reported Thursday. The 79-year-old Buss has spent time in the intensive care unit at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to the Times, which quoted Buss’ son, Jim, Thursday saying his father was ...
Taku Hiraoka won a halfpipe snowboarding competition on Thursday to claim his first World Cup title at a test event for the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. The 17-year-old Hiraoka coasted into the semifinals in first and earned the highest score of 90.25 points in ...
Details of the brutal physical and verbal abuse an Osaka high school boy suffered at the hands of his basketball coach before committing suicide in December are revealed in a report compiled by an external panel.
The man under arrest for allegedly making online threats through hijacked personal computers has told his lawyer he is not guilty and that no evidence of a computer virus for remotely controlling PCs will be found at his home. According to attorney Hiroshi Sato ...
Jonangu Shrine in Kyoto is holding a festival featuring camellia and weeping plum blossoms from next Monday to March 21. The shrine is open from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., with a guided tour at 3 p.m. by the Shinto priest. Admission is ¥500 ...
Major leasing firm Orix Corp. is in the final stages of talks to acquire Robeco, an asset management arm of Rabobank of the Netherlands, sources said Friday. According to the sources, the deal would be worth more than ¥200 billion. Orix aims to buy ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed again Friday to revise the Constitution, including amending war-renouncing Article 9 to allow Japan to exercise the right of collective self-defense. At a meeting of a Liberal Democratic Party working group on the constitutional revisions, Abe emphasized that changing ...
The mayor of Obama, Fukui Prefecture, has asked Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to give a lacquered pen to U.S. President Barack Obama as a gift for his second inauguration. Abe will present the red lacquered pen, a local specialty, and a letter from Mayor ...
Rakuten Inc. logged a group net profit of ¥19.41 billion for the business year through December, in a turnaround from the previous year’s loss of ¥2.29 billion on the costs of restructuring its credit card businesses. The Tokyo-based online shopping mall operator said Thursday ...
Toshiba Corp. on Friday unveiled a prototype of its remotely operated decontamination robot that it expects to help clean up the Fukushima No. 1 plant’s radiation-zapped reactor buildings as early as this summer. The robot — which can withstand radiation up to 100 sieverts, ...
Samurai Japan hopefuls got under way with a training camp in Miyazaki on Friday as they aim to be named for the squad for the upcoming World Baseball Classic. Japan manager Koji Yamamoto, who has been tasked with trying to win the country’s third ...
Fair Trade Commission Chairman nominee Kazuyuki Sugimoto pledged Friday to promote fair competition as head of the antimonopoly watchdog. “It is very important to promote fair, free competition to invigorate the economy and (protect) consumer interests,” he said during a confirmation hearing at the ...
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s long anticipated summit with U.S. President Barack Obama will take place Feb. 22, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga announced Friday. The main purpose of Abe’s visit to Washington is to “clearly show” that Japan is strengthening ties with the U.S., ...
The government plans to offer ¥1 trillion in loan guarantees for projects aimed at securing cheaper liquefied natural gas.
A government report released Friday lists 181 cases of improper management of official documents, including some getting lost or accidentally being discarded. Most mishandling took place at the National Tax Agency, accounting for 131 cases, or 72.4 percent of the total, followed by 18 ...
The average retail price of regular gasoline rose for the 10th consecutive week, standing at ¥153.80 per liter as of Tuesday, up ¥2.10 from a week earlier. An upward trend in the Dubai crude oil market and the yen’s recent weakness were the main ...
Ailing electronics makers Sharp Corp. and Panasonic Corp. are boosting sales of air purifiers in China as pollution worsens in the world’s most populous country, in a bid to recover from record losses. Sharp’s sales of the products, built mainly in Shanghai, tripled last ...
Toyota Motor Corp. says it will pay $29 million to 29 U.S. states and American Samoa as part of a settlement related to its safety recalls. State attorneys general sued Toyota after it recalled 14 million vehicles globally in 2009 and 2010 for sudden ...
After a series of scandals that have rocked the sports world in recent weeks, the Japanese Olympic Committee is working to improve how it handles its societal duties. At the same time, the JOC recognizes the urgency to work to restore public faith in ...
With LeBron James playing at his best level yet, the Miami Heat powered into the All-Star break with a reminder to the Oklahoma City Thunder that the NBA championship still resides on South Beach. James had 39 points, 12 rebounds and seven assists, and ...
You just knew Cristiano Ronaldo would score in Madrid on Wednesday and Manchester United fans are bracing themselves for more of the same at Old Trafford when he makes an emotional return to the Theatre of Dreams. The fact is, Ronaldo scores in most ...
The Russian subsidiary of a U.S. firm has begun work on building a geothermal power station on Kunashiri Island, which is part of a long-standing territorial row between Tokyo and Moscow, an official of the company said. The generation capacity of the new facility ...
As Josh Hamilton hammed it up with a series of good-natured wisecracks, a serious Albert Pujols sat in silence two seats away, arms crossed.
Eccentric Australian gambler David Walsh is shaking up the sleepy city of Hobart with an unorthodox new museum challenging visitors to a new pact with fermenting, defecating and dying art. It is an unassuming site for what has fast become one of Australia’s most ...
A kiss lasting nearly 2½ days has propelled a Thai couple to a new record for the world’s longest smooch. Hospital security guard Ekkachai Tiranarat, 44, and 33-year-old housewife Laksana locked lips for 58 hours, 35 minutes and 58 seconds, smashing last year’s record ...
The problem with bottom-trawling is that it lacks discrimination. The gear plows through the seabed, taking or breaking nearly everything in its path.
Scientists say they have seen the future of genetically modified foods and have concluded that it is orange or, more precisely, golden.
An Australian court on Friday dismissed a challenge against the patenting of human genetic material in a landmark case that a cancer group says could stifle research. The case hinged on whether a patent can be granted to cover naturally occurring nucleic acids, the ...
“Normally, perch are shy and hunt in schools. This is a known strategy for survival and growth. But those who swam in oxazepam became considerably bolder.”
An environmental catastrophe with greater economic impact than the global financial crash is occurring on the high seas, according to former British foreign secretary David Miliband.
Tucked under a pile of papers and trash was a confidential letter spelling out the terrorist network’s strategy to conquer northern Mali and reflecting internal discord over how to rule the region.
President Barack Obama reached out to an online audience Thursday, taking questions on deadly subjects like drones and gun violence while also musing about the anachronism of pennies and the “chill” factor in Hawaii. Participating in a Google+ Hangout chat, Obama offered assurances that ...
A growing number of South Korean corporations are turning their backs on a workaholic culture that once was seen as indispensable but increasingly is viewed as unhealthy, unproductive and inefficient. Long working hours, often followed by drinking sessions with the boss, have for years ...
Is breast-feeding far and away the best thing? Or have we done women a disservice by overstating its benefits?
President Barack Obama on Thursday rolled out a plan to vastly expand government-funded early childhood education in Georgia but kept the price secret. Obama has raised hopes among parents who want preschool for all. But Republicans are wary of high costs and have made ...
Cosmic rays — fast-moving particles that constantly pummel our planet — come from the explosion of supernovae, new research confirmed Thursday, resolving an astronomical mystery. Protons make up 90 percent of these rays, which pelt Earth’s atmosphere and were discovered a century ago by ...
Federal officials on Thursday solicited proposals to create six drone test sites around the U.S. in a major step toward opening domestic skies to thousands of unmanned drones. The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration also posted online a draft plan for protecting people’s privacy from ...
Israel’s military censor, which has long served as the country’s guardian of state secrets, is suddenly under the microscope following a pair of sensitive reports broken by the international media.
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry’s family financial portfolio could grow by hundreds of thousands of dollars as a result of the $23 billion mega-deal between Nebraska billionaire Warren Buffett and a Brazil-owned investment firm to buy out ketchup and food producer H.J. Heinz ...
