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P/CLOUDY
NTT DoCoMo Inc., despite being Japan’s biggest mobile phone carrier, has been struggling against tough smartphone competition from KDDI Corp. and Softbank Corp., which is leading in that area. But one edge that the cellphone behemoth — it has more than 60 million subscribers ...
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 ...
If you don’t get into the ring once or twice, then you’re a coward, Geoffrey Ima says as he describes people’s attitudes toward boxing in his hometown in Uganda. Ima has been in the ring hundreds of times and came to love boxing so ...
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, ...
The 27-year-old defender says he was ready for a change of scenery after helping Sanfrecce Hiroshima win theJ. League title last season.
Laura Montoya, the first Colombian to be elevated to sainthood by the Roman Catholic Church, was generally considered crazy by the urban society she abandoned in 1914 when she moved to the jungle to minister to indigenous people, a longtime follower says. “It was ...
Pope Francis belongs to the Jesuits, a religious order whose members take an unusual — and at the moment seemingly ironic — vow: not to strive for a higher office. The Jesuits’ culture of modesty and self-effacement has been on full display in recent ...
The Rev. Julio Cesar Grassi was a celebrity in the archdiocese of Buenos Aires. The young, dynamic, media-savvy priest networked with wealthy Argentines to fund an array of schools, orphanages and job training programs for poor and abandoned youths, winning praise from Argentine politicians ...
As Pope Francis starts out in the Vatican, a trusty fellow Jesuit will be helping him broadcast his message: the Rev. Federico Lombardi. The head of the Vatican’s press office under the recently retired Benedict XVI, Lombardi has so far kept his job and ...
The Rev. Jorge Mario Bergoglio was 39 years old when Argentina’s military junta seized power in March 1976. The seven years that followed were a time of darkness in his country.
“If I don’t marry you, I’ll become a priest.” They didn’t get married. He became a priest. And on Wednesday, he became the pope. According to a bespectacled, white-haired woman identified only as Amalia, Jorge Bergoglio wrote those words to her in a letter ...
For his name as pope, Jorge Bergoglio chose one that harks back eight centuries to St. Francis of Assisi, a man who renounced a life of privilege, gave away everything he owned, wore a coarse woolen tunic, lived in a hut and took a ...
From Pius to Clement, Hilarius to Simplicius, papal names from down the centuries are inextricably linked to the brilliant or wretched legacies of the men who have ruled the Vatican. Cardinals gathered in a secret conclave to elect a new pope to head up ...
The famous smoke from a chimney to indicate whether cardinals locked away in the Sistine Chapel have elected a pope is not created just by burning used ballots, the Vatican said Tuesday. “We use smoke flares,” said Paolo Sagretti, who was in charge of ...
It is known throughout the Vatican as the Relatio (Narration). It is contained in two stiff, unmarked red folders and runs to around 300 pages. Lying in a safe in the papal apartments of the Apostolic Palace overlooking St. Peter’s Square, it will be ...
On an April 2009 visit to the Italian mountain town of Sulmona, Pope Benedict XVI solemnly placed his pallium, the vestment symbolizing his papal authority, on the tomb of Celestine V. The medieval pontiff’s abdication in 1294 had resulted in imprisonment by his successor ...
Pope Benedict XVI delivered an emotional final Sunday prayer in St. Peter’s Square, saying God had told him to devote himself to quiet contemplation but pledging not to “abandon” the church. Tens of thousands of supporters turned out for Benedict’s weekly Angelus prayer, his ...