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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
LOS ANGELES — It is precisely during economic and political tension that more frequent and fervent expressions of sincere humility might serve to smooth over some tough spots. After all, being truly humble can serve to downsize egos that otherwise tend to mushroom minor ...
LOS ANGELES — Not every election has significant international repercussions, to be sure. Some are scarcely noteworthy even in the places where they occur. But in March there was a monster piece of an election in East Asia, and early last week the landslide ...
LOS ANGELES — A significant number of West Virginians (and some others in America) evidently take the view that U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Hussein Obama is a Muslim. In a surpassingly depressing report from the coal-miner state on the eve of Tuesday’s West ...
LOS ANGELES — How much suffering must a nation and its people go through before everyone says enough is enough? You could certainly ask that question of Sudan, which is relentlessly war-ravaged, or of North Korea, which is all but medieval-ized by a profoundly ...
LOS ANGELES — I wish more people understood Japan better. I wish I understood Japan better. It’s not that Japanese people are so utterly inscrutable; that’s an almost racist proposition. And it’s not that Japan itself is so impossibly mysterious; other countries and cultures ...
LOS ANGELES — As matters now stand, accredited, professional journalists from Taiwan are once again being denied press passes by U.N. authorities to cover the annual World Health Assembly of the World Health Organization. This year’s event takes place in Geneva on May 19. ...
LOS ANGELES — OK, so he did lose the Pennsylvania primary — but might Sen. Barack Obama be otherwise elected king of the world? Let’s imagine that there was one additional presidential primary added to the endless mix that helps determine who will next ...
LOS ANGELES — Call it what you will. In the red-baiting McCarthy era, to be sure, it probably would have been labeled as some sort of sinister Fifth Column operating on behalf of Beijing behind America’s lines. They themselves call their U.S.-based organization, rather ...
LOS ANGELES — One early sign that a run of optimism may be on the way is the point at which the utility of continued pessimism is seen as utterly dysfunctional by all concerned. It is as if things will be sucked into some ...
HO CHI MINH CITY — Sure, the election of the next president of the United States will be the most closely watched election in Asia or anywhere else this year. America, for all its stumbles, is still the No. 1 superpower: So whomever the ...
HO CHI MINH CITY — Powerful women seem to be appearing frequently in Asian news these days. Recent headlines have trumpeted the continued defiance of Burmese leader Aung San Suu Kyi while mourning the assassination of the Pakistani heir-apparent Benazir Bhutto. The truth is ...
LOS ANGELES — Admirers of Barack Obama who glibly and favorably compare the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency to John F. Kennedy always assume that they are doing the former a favor. But there’s another way to look at it — and it’s ...