AP A car bomb exploded outside a mosque Sunday, killing at least 37 people and wounding another 141 in a mostly Shiite Muslim neighborhood in the southern Pakistan city of Karachi — the third mass-casualty attack on the minority sect in the country this ...
It's a dangerous, unpredictable world. Twice in January Chinese warships in the East China Sea challenged Japan's Maritime Self Defense Forces patrols in a manner deemed threatening. And on Feb. 12 came North Korea's nuclear test.
Here's an open secret: Japanese men have a bad international reputation on the romance front.
SELLING WOMEN: Prostitution, Markets and the Household in Early Modern Japan, by Amy Stanley. University of California Press, 2012, 282 pp., $49.95 (hardcover) In the vast cultural landscape, Japan fascinates the mainstream with manga and anime, the martial arts, Zen and kimono. Of course, ...
Kenta Maeda shook off worries about his form with five shutout innings as Japan beat China 5-2 in first-round Pool A of the World Baseball Classic on Sunday at Fukuoka Dome. Japan improved to 2-0 following a tough win over Brazil in Saturday evening’s ...
The government plans to drastically ease debt-related rules under the Civil Code to sharply reduce the burden on guarantors. There have been many cases in which borrowers defaulted, leaving the guarantors, including some not adequately informed of the loan particulars, holding the debt. This ...
President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans made no progress this past week in heading off $85 billion in budget cuts that automatically start taking effect March 1. Lacking a bipartisan deal to avoid them and hoping to heap blame and pressure on Republican lawmakers, ...
It was only a matter of time. With many of its debt-ridden euro partners in recession, Germany could only swim against the tide for so long. Figures Thursday showed that output in Germany, Europe’s largest economy, contracted by more than anticipated in the final ...
Jamaica will restructure its local debt for the second time in three years as the Caribbean island struggles to boost economic growth and secure a new accord with the International Monetary Fund. The nation asked bondholders late Monday to exchange “higher-interest debt for lower-cost ...
Prime Minister David Cameron claimed victory in his battle to slash the EU budget Friday, saying marathon talks proved that his promise of a referendum on EU membership had not left Britain isolated. Cameron had vowed to accept nothing less than a real-term freeze ...
Actual spending, or “payments” in EU jargon, was set at €908.4 billion ($1.2 trillion), with an absolute ceiling of €960 billion for spending “commitments” ― the maximum amount that can be allocated to programs. The commitment figure is just 1 percent of the bloc’s ...
Two days of face-to-face meetings between Canada’s trade minister and his EU counterpart, ending late Thursday, failed to break a deadlock on the last stumbling blocks to reaching a free-trade pact. “Progress was made in several of the areas that remain outstanding. However, further ...
European Union leaders prepared the first-ever cuts in the bloc’s budget Friday, bowing to British Prime Minister David Cameron’s insistence on thrift. After an all-night bargaining session interspersed with catnaps on couches at EU headquarters in Brussels, the leaders reassembled at 6:30 a.m. to ...
Ireland clinched a long-sought agreement Thursday with the European Central Bank to restructure the loans used to bail out its failing banks, a deal expected to reduce the national debt by €20 billion ($27 billion) in the coming decade and help the country’s expected ...
The financially struggling U.S. Postal Service said Wednesday it will stop delivering mail on Saturdays but continue to disburse packages six days a week, an apparent end run around an unaccommodating Congress. The change continues the shrinking of what used to be one of ...
President Barack Obama on Tuesday urged Congress to head off deep, automatic spending cuts set to hit the Pentagon and other federal agencies on March 1 and replace them, at least for a few months, with a new debt-reduction package that includes fresh tax ...
In the U.S., tax hikes have been the subject of partisan warfare that brought the country to the very edge of a “fiscal cliff.” In Southern Europe, spending cuts have led to mass protests and labor strikes. Maybe both could learn from the Dutch, ...
