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 ...
With hindsight, successful ideas always look brilliant, but that doesn’t mean everyone involved viewed them as such from the outset. That’s especially true in the world of film finance, where producers are loathe to gamble with people’s money, and the best approach is usually ...
OK, my job this week is to convince you that “The Ides of March” is one of the best films you’ll ever see about politics and elections and the eventual disillusion we all come to harbor about both. But this task is complicated by ...
In his book “Retromania,” music critic Simon Reynolds makes the case that pop music/rock has gone distressingly meta, feeding on its accumulated history at the expense of any further forward evolution musically. It’s a bold argument — and well worth a read — but ...
If there’s one thing that’s certain about predictions of the apocalypse, it’s that none of them have been correct to date. The mother of all end-of-the-world predictions was 2012 — according to all that Mayan calendar mumbo-jumbo — and yet, here we are. Or ...
Sexual addiction is defined by one recovery-program website as “any compulsive or impulsive sexual activity that falls into one of three categories: shameful, secretive or abusive.” Well, that’s a bit of a party-killer, isn’t it? Beyond the fact that this defines as illness so ...
Don’t ever say it’s just a film! It’s not just a film!” So rages one super-size fanboy in the documentary “The People vs. George Lucas,” which delves into “Star Wars,” its huge impact on popular culture and the rabid fans it has spawned like ...
“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” was released last Christmas in the United States, slightly after the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. One would like to suppose that the filmmakers realized the crassness of opening a 9/11-themed film any closer to the actual ...
An angry mob of protesters waving banners and wielding bats advances on a government building protected by black-clad riot police. Hooded hotheads break open the gates and all hell breaks loose. The scene looks as if it could have been filmed yesterday at an ...
Try to imagine a future where the super-rich live in gated, patrolled fortress-communities, completely isolated from the short, brutish lives of the underclass who must toil or die, just a paycheck away from having their life-force literally terminated by the powers that be. No, ...
On one level, “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” is simply an Agatha Christie story for Nine Inch Nails fans. You may think I’m joking, but think about it: an isolated island full of disgruntled relatives in a wealthy family, an unsolved murder with ...
