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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.
Several years ago, I read cancer surgeon Fumio Yamazaki’s unforgettable book titled “Dying in a Japanese Hospital.” Through case studies of his patients, he describes the final moments in the lives of terminal cancer sufferers. Invariably, just as a patient is slipping away, doctors ...
As we heard in a government white paper on the elderly last week, the number of people aged 90 or over topped 1 million in Japan for the first time in 2004. Japan has long held the record for its citizens having the longest ...
Stress can motivate us, but it can also get us down. And though it might just make us feel blue, it can also kill us. It depresses levels of sex hormones and people stressed by deadlines are more likely to suffer heart attacks. In ...
In David Mitchell’s compelling novel “Cloud Atlas,” two of the characters climb the dormant Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, and find giant domes — observatories — at the peak of the great mountain. The novel — published last year — is comprised of six ...
Quarry workers in the Neander Valley in Germany dug up more than limestone when, in 1856, they came across parts of an old skull and skeleton. By 1864, other similar specimens had been found and studied, and the archaic human was recognized as a ...
It is a commonly held belief that we don’t tap into the full power of our brains. Self-help gurus make millions by exploiting this belief, separating people from their money by making them think there is a secret to tapping mysterious, unused reserves of ...
Stung by the phenomenal success of the “Harry Potter” books, some people like to preach about the infantilization of culture, and some critics worry that adults are wallowing in childhood. A companion worry is that children are growing up too fast, becoming sexualized at ...
The 18th-century British philosopher David Hume said “Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” With time, this became condensed into today’s familiar soundbite: “Beauty is in the eye ...
This year has been a vintage one for biologists interested in human evolution. In a cave on an Indonesian island, the remains of a new species of human were found, a species that lived only 18,000 years ago and hence overlapped with modern Homo ...
Women are nicer than men. I’m sure most people will agree. Of course there are the nasty, heartless, scheming ones — but there are plenty of men who fit that description. On average, though, women are better at empathizing with others, and better at ...
On average, men are bigger, stronger and more aggressive than women. The behavioral and physiological differences are the result of sexual competition: Males tend to fight among themselves for females, and so tend to be bigger and stronger. The pattern holds across most species. ...
Former Colorado congresswoman Pat Schroeder once quipped: “I have a brain and a uterus and I use both.” The former is what separates humans from other mammals; the latter is what separates mammals from everything else. Although mammals number only some 4,300 species (not ...