Fed to start tapering bond purchases this year: Bernanke

The Federal Reserve maintains its $85 billion-a-month asset purchase program, but says it could begin scaling back later this year.

U.S. tries to save peace talks after Karzai objects to Taliban's Qatar 'embassy'

U.S. officials are scrambling to save Taliban peace talks after an angry Afghan President Hamid Karzai suspends security negotiations with the Americans.

Social Issues | ABE'S PROMISES

Dilemma: How to shed white elephants' red ink?

by Kazuaki Nagata

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing for an alternative type of public works project that allows private-sector entities to finance, construct and then operate infrastructure facilities.

Japan, Brazil to restart talks on nuclear deal stalled since Fukushima crisis

Japan and Brazil are expected to agree at a bilateral summit meeting next week to resume negotiations on concluding a nuclear cooperation accord, a government source said. The two sides began the talks in January 2011 but they have remained suspended since the nuclear ...

World

Obama to call for big cuts in nuclear arms

U.S. leader Barack Obama will Wednesday propose major cuts in American and Russian nuclear arsenals, making a pitch for his own place in history in an evocative open-air speech during his first visit as president to Berlin. Almost 50 years to the day since ...

Business

Business | ANALYSIS

Pitch to G-8 colleagues leaves Abe in a bind

by Daisuke Yamamoto

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, by pitching his economic policies to his fellow leaders at the Group of Eight summit in Northern Ireland, has put himself in a bind with the need to show a blueprint for achieving both growth and fiscal rehabilitation. The just-completed ...

Asia Pacific

Monsoon floods kill over 120 in India

Military helicopters carried out emergency food drops Wednesday for thousands of people stranded by flash flooding from early monsoon rains that have killed at least 120 in northern India, officials said. The states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh have witnessed torrential rain at least ...

Reference

Reference | SO WHAT THE HECK IS THAT

Okigusuri

by Alice Gordenker

Dear Alice, I was on a two-week home stay in the countryside of Japan when a visitor came to the house. I don’t think he was expected, but my home-stay mother greeted him like an old friend and fetched a plastic drawer-box from the ...

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