19
CLEAR
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.
Among the many unpleasant discoveries made by those who stashed their cash in Cypriot banks is that the island’s government could stop them moving their money elsewhere. Capital controls are supposed to be a thing of the past, a figment of the pre-globalized world. ...
Australian author Bruce Chatwin has a lot to answer for. Specifically, he's responsible for a forthcoming initial public offering (IPO) on the Italian stock market. It all goes back to something he wrote in his 1986 book "The Songlines."
Washington poet and literary activist E. Ethelbert Miller insists there is a difference between his poem “Before Hip Hop” when it is shown like this: Before Hip Hop there was Nat King Cole Sugar Ray and Miles. Cool was how you held a cigarette ...
On March 18, amid great hoopla, the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering was awarded to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Kahn, Vinton Cerf, Louis Pouzin and Marc Andreessen. The 15-person selection panel said the five men had all contributed to the recent revolution in communications ...
The Nintendo Wii U, which was released late last year, is outfitted with a near communication field (NCF) reader, and the first game to make use of it is the upcoming, downloadable Wii U title, “Pokemon Scramble U.”
Apple Inc. has been always loved by people in Japan. Even during its toughest years, in the 1990s, after cofounder Steve Jobs had been expelled and the company was almost dead, its Macintosh computer held a much greater market share in Japan than in ...
One of the wonders of the online world is the “Downfall” meme on YouTube. (For those whose time is too valuable to be wasted watching video clips, I should explain that the parody is based on remixing a scene from Oliver Hirschbiegel’s film, “Der ...
Nikon has delivered a pocket-ready point-and-shoot camera in its Coolpix A, the new flagship model in its Coolpix line up, due to be available in Japan on March 28. It has a DSLR-like 16.2 megapixel, full-size DX format (aka APS-C) CMOS image sensor, and ...
A few years ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published a bestselling book with the title “The World is Flat.” In it he used the concept of “flatness” to describe “how more people can plug, play, compete, connect and collaborate with more equal ...
Despite rumors to the contrary, the Japanese independent-game scene is alive and well. Over the past weekend in Kyoto, nearly 180 game developers packed into an event hall to show off their latest self-made creations at the first BitSummit.
Some years ago, when the Google Books project, which aims to digitize all of the world’s printed books, was getting under way, the two cofounders of Google were having a meeting with the librarian of one of the universities that had signed up for ...
As spring descends on Japan, we’ll all be welcoming warmer temperatures and cherry blossoms in the coming weeks. But spring in Japan typically means new smartphone lineups from Japan’s major mobile carriers, too. And while consumers’ love for Apple’s iPhone is still in full ...