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CLOUDY
Former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s private disco featured not only aspiring showgirls performing striptease acts as sexy nuns and nurses, but one woman dressed up as President Barack Obama and a prominent Milan prosecutor whom the billionaire media mogul has accused of persecuting him, ...
Tonkatsu is comfort food, gourmand grub — not a gourmet delicacy. So what are those hearty, unpretentious deep-fried breaded pork cutlets doing in an elegant little bar-style restaurant above one of Ginza’s temples to high-end consumption? Katsuzen has come a long way from its ...
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 ...
It is a tricky deal being an authorized biographer. Charles Moore’s big advantage over those who have previously tackled Margaret Thatcher is that he has been provided with material denied to them. Of the arrangement that he was offered by his subject, he writes: ...
Unbelievable energy. Splendid self confidence. Never-wavering faith in his abilities or his teammates. Those are ingredients to success for Draelon Burns, the Yokohama B-Corsairs’ super substitute. Burns buried a remarkable three buzzer-beating shots to close out the three final quarters, and his team needed ...
More workers than ever before were approved for compensation for work-related mental illnesses in fiscal 2011, according to the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare. While those statistics offer hope of treatment for those suffering and are a clear recognition that workplaces are one ...
The Diet on June 20 enacted a law to establish a nuclear regulatory commission. If the new body is established, it will end the current system, in which the authorities promoting nuclear power generation and the authorities regulating it are virtually integrated in the ...
The Cabinet Office’s preliminary report on May 17 stated that Japan’s gross domestic product in the January-March period increased by 1 percent from the previous quarter in real terms or an annualized 4.1 percent. This performance, better than expected by private-sector analysts, is mainly ...
Nonprofit organizations play important roles in such areas as education, social welfare, public health and medical services and environmental protection in communities; after the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami, they have also been active in disaster relief efforts. A revised NPO law went into force ...
A recent Cabinet Office survey has found that 32.9 percent of married women have experienced domestic abuse. This percentage has remained unchanged from the two previous surveys in 2005 and 2008, indicating that little help has been provided for the ongoing tragedy in one-third ...
Japan’s economic prospects are not very bright due to the effects of the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami and the stronger yen. But it is not that the prospects are completely gloomy. The government’s monthly assessment of the economy for April released in mid-April by ...
A panel of the Cabinet Office announced late last month that if a megaquake occurs in the Nankai Trough, a tsunami higher than 20 meters may hit 23 municipalities in six prefectures stretching from Kanto to Shikoku on Japan’s Pacific side. The prediction represents ...
The Noda Cabinet on Friday endorsed and submitted to the Diet a bill aimed at raising the consumption tax from the current 5 percent to 8 percent from April in 2014 and to 10 percent from October 2015. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda is so ...