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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
The Bible tells us that “those who sow in tears sing as they reap” (Psalm 126). This was true for the Jews as they returned to Jerusalem after their prolonged exile in Babylonia. However, more recent history has shown us that there can be ...
The old are invariably critical of the young. Japan is no exception. The older generation finds much to bemoan in the attitudes and behaviors of their successors. One of the many complaints lodged against the younger generation in Japan is that they lack the ...
I don’t like to say I told you so, but I told you so. Back in July last year, I wrote in this column that the post-Lehman shock world was participating in a drama in five acts, in which the fourth was likely to ...
Saint Thomas More is the patron saint of politicians. As a Catholic myself I should have known this before, but the information actually came to me quite recently via the Mainichi Shimbun. So many thanks to the newspaper for this piece of religious education. ...
The movie “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Arthur C. Clarke’s epoch-making science fiction masterpiece, was first published in 1968. Its sequel “2010: Odyssey Two” came out in 1982. To put “2010″ more precisely in its place, it was actually the first sequel among three. The ...
A newspaper headline tells me ‘Pace of growth picks up in Japan.” The actual figures bear out the statement. Japan’s real GDP registered a quarter-on-quarter increase of 1.2 percent in the July-September quarter. The Japanese economy is expanding. But is it? Take a look ...
I have triangles on the mind lately. I used to think that economic activity was a triangle with growth, competition and distribution making up its three sides. The perfect triangle is equilateral. That is to say, its three sides are identical in length. It ...
Politics is not the kind of stuff you normally stay up to watch on the telly long into the night. Not unless scandals, drunkenness and other juicy activities are involved, of course. But on Wednesday night, things were just a little bit different. On ...
“All the world’s a stage.” So says the Bard, and who are we to argue? The global economy is certainly not short on drama these days. In fact, it feels very much as though we are living through a play in five acts, the ...
The automaker General Motors filed for bankruptcy earlier this month, and there are surely two people rejoicing in their graves at the news. One of them is John DeLorean. The other is Clement Attlee. DeLorean will be known to many as the maverick car ...
Who are the people that are suffering the most as this global depression unfolds? Clearly, it is the weakest members of society who are getting the worst deal. That, sadly, is the way it has always worked. There’s not much that can be done ...
We used to think that SARS was the killer disease. No doubt it still is. But at least it seems dormant for the moment. In its place we now have a potentially more potent epidemic going around that looks set to engulf the whole ...