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DRIZZLE/RAIN
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 ...
North Korea is expanding a missile launch site in the country's northeast and has changed the shape of warheads to improve missile accuracy, a Seoul daily reports.
Satellite images show that Iran’s Arak heavy water plant is operational, raising fears that it is trying to produce plutonium for a nuclear bomb, Britain’s Daily Telegraph claimed Tuesday. The newspaper published images on its website that appear to show steam rising from forced ...
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a rare acknowledgment Saturday night of the economic challenges his country is facing. “This was a very difficult year for our economy,” Ahmadinejad said during a live television interview in which he outlined his government’s budget plan for the ...
The Iranian-backed Shiite group responsible for most of the attacks against U.S. forces in the final years of the Iraq war is busily reinventing itself as a political organization in ways that could enhance Iran’s influence in post-American Iraq — and perhaps beyond. In ...
North Korea is upgrading one of its major missile launch sites, apparently to handle far bigger rockets, and the design features implicate Iran.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday wagered his second term on an ambitious bid to strengthen America at home by reigniting its economic engine, cutting gun killings and fixing a broken immigration system. Focusing his State of the Union address squarely on domestic priorities, Obama ...
Iran and its Lebanese-based ally, Hezbollah, are trying to build a network of militias inside Syria to protect their interests there in case President Bashar Assad falls, The Washington Post reported. Citing unnamed U.S. and Middle Eastern officials, the paper said that Iran’s goal ...
Iran is stepping up its support for Syria while Russia is still arming President Bashar Assad’s regime and Israel has fired missiles into the country, heightening fears that the conflict may spill over its borders, U.S. officials say. The assessments came as U.S. Vice ...
Federal investigators looking into disclosures of classified information about a cyber-operation that targeted Iran’s nuclear program have increased pressure on current and former senior government officials who are suspected of involvement, according to people familiar with the investigation. Prosecutors are pursuing “everybody — at ...
A heated debate about who will be allowed to run in Iran’s presidential election has erupted five months before the vote, stoking concerns about a repeat of the protests that followed the contested 2009 poll. At the heart of the controversy is whether the ...
The Metropolitan Police Department arrested three people Wednesday at a Tokyo-based shipping firm on suspicion of sending money to an Iranian company in violation of international sanctions on Tehran. Arrested were Kuniaki Mizushima, a 64-year-old executive with Ben Line Agencies (Japan) Ltd., Toshiaki Notake, ...
Ever since European seaports closed their gates to Iranian oil tankers last summer, Iran has looked to the East to keep its economy afloat. Countries such as China, India and South Korea — some of them critics of Western sanctions — have offered Iran ...