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Farmers in the city of Tamura, Fukushima Prefecture, have begun planting rice in a district once designated a no-go zone because of radioactive fallout ejected by the disaster-hit Fukushima No. 1 power plant.
Recently I was asked to write a blurb for a new liquid plant-nutrient. As soon as I saw the name of the product, 早根早起 （Hayane Hayaoki), I smiled at this example of linguistic creativity.
Life in Japan just seems tailor-made for certain foreign residents, who slip into the fabric of this society as smoothly as a hand slides into a glove. American Curtis Patterson, a professional koto player and music teacher, is a case in point. Not only ...
Denmark’s Emmelie de Forest won this year’s Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday night with her ethno-inspired flute and drum tune “Only Teardrops,” despite tough competition from spectacular stage shows by performers from Azerbaijan and Ukraine. Juries and television viewers across Europe awarded the barefoot, ...
One team’s quest for a first title has ended. The other team’s fight will continue next season. The Yokohama B-Corsairs outplayed the Rizing Fukuoka in Sunday’s bj-league championship game, controlling the tempo for larger stretches and making enough timely baskets to fill an instructional ...
A U.S. federal judge has ruled that the online news “clipping” service Meltwater violates copyright law by using excerpts from articles by The Associated Press, it was announced Thursday. The AP sued Meltwater, claiming the service infringed on its copyright by delivering its articles ...
The Washington Post said Monday it would start charging frequent readers for online access starting in mid-2013, with some details still to be finalized. The move, which had been expected, will require a paid subscription after 20 articles or multimedia features have been read ...
Evgeny Morozov is a Belarus-born technology writer who has held positions at Stanford and Georgetown universities in the United States. His first book, “The Net Delusion,” argued that “Western do-gooders may have missed how [the Internet] … entrenches dictators, threatens dissidents, and makes it ...
Samsung on Thursday unveiled a slim, feature-rich Galaxy S 4 as its new champion to take on Apple in the fiercely competitive smartphone arena. The South Korean electronics giant introduced the Galaxy S 4 on the stage of New York City’s Radio City Music ...
It is often hard to tell which is the Web’s priority: helping you learn about the world or helping the world — and especially advertisers — learn about you. But that balance is beginning to shift, to the delight of consumer advocates and the ...
Outrage over Google’s decision to pull the plug on Reader flooded the Internet on Thursday as lovers of the RSS service for tracking website updates lobbied to keep it alive. A “Keep Google Reader Running” petition at change.org had racked up more than 70,000 ...
The music industry announced Tuesday the first increase in global sales since 1999, suggesting that the long-awaited rebound against the digital revolution has begun. Sales rose 0.3 percent to $16.5 billion in 2012, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which ...
The big-budget “House of Cards” original series launched this month on Netflix highlights the growing importance of streaming video, which is ramping up competition against traditional television. With stars including Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright, the new 13-episode series, estimated by some to have ...
In late October, researchers at North Carolina State University alerted Google to a security flaw that could let scam artists send phony text messages to Android phones — a practice called “smishing” that can ensnare consumers in fraud. Google’s security officials replied in minutes, ...
The federal government wants to create Wi-Fi networks across America, so powerful and broad in reach that consumers could use them to make calls or surf the Internet without paying a cellphone bill every month. The proposal from the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has ...
When reporters from The New Yorker, “NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams,” “Good Morning America,” The Associated Press and The Washington Post, have all converged upon one event, it must be important. An appearance by the president. A press conference about dignified matters, with ...
The Liberal Democratic Party has outlined legislation that would allow the use of all types of online communications tools, including email, Facebook and Twitter, for election campaigns, LDP lawmakers said. “A partial lifting of the ban on online election campaigning would not meet the ...