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P/SUNNY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
LONDON — Mortgage lending is inevitably long term. To cover such lending, banks depend on deposits by savers that may well be short term. If banks don’t have enough deposits to cover their loans, they have to borrow on the interbank market. Banks are ...
LONDON — “The have-yachts and the have-nots” is a phrase used in London to distinguish between the very rich and not so rich. It reflects the growing disparity between the mega-rich and the rest. The mega-rich include hedge fund managers as well as the ...
LONDON — The British summer this year has been a nonevent: Rain, clouds and wind. The temptation has been to fly south to the Mediterranean where the sun has been scorching. But there is no joy in flying these days. The main London airports ...
LONDON — Britain is notorious for its weather. This year April was unusually fine and warm. May, June and July were unseasonably cool. To describe these months as “wet” would be an English understatement. There was record rainfall with some places being deluged by ...
LONDON — Prospects for Iraq and its people are gloomy. Responsibility for that rests partly with Saddam Hussein and his evil regime, but also with the Americans and their allies for botching the aftermath of the March 2003 invasion. The first question is not ...
LONDON — The terrorists who committed the atrocities in London on July 7, 2005, seemed to have been of limited education and from relatively poor backgrounds. The four terrorists who were convicted recently of plotting mass murder on the London transport system on July ...
LONDON — The recent European summit in Brussels reached a compromise on a treaty that would replace the proposed European constitution rejected by voters in France and the Netherlands. Tony Blair, in one of his final appearances as prime minister, claims to have preserved ...
CULTURE AND POWER IN GERMANY AND JAPAN: The Spirit of Renewal, by Nils-Johan Jorgensen. Global Oriental, 318 pp., 2006, £50 (cloth) The author of this interesting and thought-provoking study was a Norwegian diplomat who served in both Germany and Japan. He acquired a good ...
LONDON — Leaders of the summit countries have been changing. Gerhard Schroeder, the German Social Democratic chancellor of Germany, was the first to go. His replacement, Angela Merkel, is a Christian Democrat but leading a coalition with the Social Democrats. The next was Japan’s ...
LONDON — Alexander Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who had denounced corruption in the FSB, the successor to the KGB, is thought to have been murdered in London last November. His death was particularly horrific as he died after prolonged suffering as a result ...
LONDON — Mergers and acquisitions have been much in the news in the last few weeks. These have raised some controversial issues. One of these concerns the role of private equity. Another is that of cross-border mergers. The American private equity firm of KKR ...
LONDON — In Britain we have not yet quite lost the battle to preserve the countryside, but it is far from won. In Japan, however, it looks to many outsiders as if preservation is a lost cause. In Britain, the Campaign for the Preservation ...