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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
Throughout most of Japan, June is the rainy season. While all that rainfall is great for rice paddies so that we can have delicious new harvest rice in the fall, it makes it a rather dull month for seasonal produce: The summer’s bounty of ...
“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, ...
Claude Regy says the team at the Shizuoka Performing Arts Center (SPAC) threw him the “best birthday party ever” when he arrived in Japan just days after the actual May 1 occasion. The 90-year-old French director is hoping for an even better birthday gift, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
The destruction wrought by the Great East Japan Earthquake has started to appear in statistics in its full force. New car sales in April fell 47.3 percent from a year ago to 185,673 units, while gross domestic product for the January-March quarter contracted 0.9 ...
More than three weeks after Tohoku and the eastern parts of the Kanto region were hit by a massive earthquake that triggered a tsunami and a nuclear power plant crisis — there are few indications of when Japan might get the situation under control. ...
This year’s annual “shunto” labor-management wage talks appear to be proceeding on a subdued note. There can be three major reasons why. One is that Japan’s official unemployment rate has topped 5 percent for three years in a row. This is still much lower ...
The Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum’s high-level meeting on growth strategy in Beppu, Oita Prefecture, wrapped up with a chairman’s statement on actions to be taken by 2015. That strategy is to be formally adopted at the APEC summit in November, with revisions due by ...
The G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto, closely watched last month as Europe struggled to halt the chain reaction of doubt set in motion by the Greek debt crisis, exposed their inability to coordinate on quelling financial uncertainty. The problems in the European Union ...
The storm that is the Greek debt problem continues to rage through the global markets. In an emergency meeting May 2, the finance ministers of the European Union agreed to work with the International Monetary Fund to provide 110 billion euro in loans to ...
Share prices are picking up worldwide amid a growing sense that the global economy has finally hit bottom. However, we see no big change in the conservative ways Japanese households are managing their assets, which are mainly savings accounts. The recent jumps in share ...
The Japanese economy posted growth in the last quarter, but I would like to make a few observations about the components of the growth. The revised figures for gross domestic product in October-December 2009, announced on March 11, showed that economic activity grew 0.9 ...
The euro’s value is falling conspicuously. Compared with the highs in the last quarter of 2009, Europe’s unified currency has dropped from around ¥135 to ¥122, and from about $1.52 to roughly $1.37, losing nearly 10 percent against the yen and the dollar. What ...
With one real estate megaproject after another, including an man-made resort island shaped like a coconut tree and the world’s tallest skyscraper, Dubai has been aiming to turn the tiny emirate into the financial center of the Middle East. On Nov. 25, the state-run ...
Ten years have passed since the euro was launched as a common European currency by 12 members of the European Union based on the Maastricht Treaty of 1992. The euro was initially used only for interbank trading and other electronic transactions, but the debut ...
The G20 summit in Pittsburg reaffirmed the need for a common set of policies to correct global imbalances, and the G7 finance ministers and central bank chiefs, meeting later on in Istanbul, agreed that wild fluctuations in exchange rates harm global economic and financial ...