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Pope Francis’ fascination with the devil took on remarkable new twists Tuesday, with a well-known exorcist insisting Francis helped “liberate” a Mexican man possessed by four different demons despite the Vatican’s insistence that no such papal exorcism took place. The case concerns a 43-year-old ...
Kazuhiro Shiraishi, 66, is a guest-house manager in the Izu-kogen Highlands, a famous resort area on the Izu Peninsula of Shizuoka Prefecture. Looking out onto the Pacific Ocean, and just 90 minutes by train from Tokyo, Izu has a warm climate all year round ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
Guitarist Dustin Wong hesitates for a split second. It’s a pause that would go unnoticed during most other sets, but Wong has spent the last 40 minutes seemingly in a trance while playing guitar and looping the notes via an array of pedals in ...
Tim Duncan saves the day as the Spurs hold off the Grizzlies in overtime
Last month, these pages carried the story of a Kurdish family that came to Japan seeking asylum, only to be torn apart by the country’s arcane immigration laws. The experience of Erdal Dogan, his wife Meryem and their two small children, suggested a system ...
“Japan’s support for the war is special,” believes Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara. “We are under threat ourselves from another terrorist state, North Korea, which has kidnapped 150 of our citizens. 150 people! I don’t think any of them are alive. Pyongyang is also sending ...
North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, who says he has been “humiliated” by Prime Minister Koizumi and will never again talk to him, formed a secret alliance with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, even as his regime was preparing thousands of liters of ...
In a dingy apartment in Kawaguchi, Saitama, Turkish Kurd Meryem Kosan and her children Merve, 4, and Mehmet Serxwebijn, 12 months, wait for their father Erdal to come home. Eerdal has been locked up in a detention center for illegal immigrants and visa overstayers ...
Erbil Suleyman has never read the Czech writer Franz Kafka, but he should. Since arriving in Narita Airport on Nov. 13, 1998, as a Kurdish refugee from Turkey, Suleyman’s life has resembled one of Kafka’s stories, with their hapless characters trapped in absurd situations ...
Until a year ago, the tallest structure I could see from my apartment in Hashimoto, Kanagawa Prefecture, was the neon sign for the local Denny’s. Not any more. A forest of cranes now rings the site of one of the area’s largest redevelopment projects, ...
For three days last month, Ayako Nishimura and hundreds of students, pacifists, leftists and religious groups took their banners and bullhorns to the port of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture. Their target was the Aegis battleship Kirishima, which the Koizumi government had controversially agreed to ...