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The head of an official inquiry into the deadly collapse of a Bangladesh factory complex said the building’s owner was the “main culprit” for the disaster because he violated construction codes. The cave-in of the eight-story Rana Plaza outside the capital last month killed ...
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 ...
“I was stopped by two men in a government-registered vehicle, blindfolded and dragged off the street. They took me away to a house in a place I did not know. I was forced into a room with blood all over the walls and floor, ...
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, ...
As far as debuts go, Shohei Otani's delivered. The celebrated rookie pitched fairly well on Thursday night, and though he finished outside the decision, he left the mound with the Hokkaido Nippon Ham Fighters well within striking distance of the Tokyo Yakult Swallows.
As it prepares to hold its latest annual summit in New Delhi on March 28-29, the BRICS grouping — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa — remains a concept in search of a common identity and institutionalized cooperation. That is hardly surprising, given ...
For the past few years, there has been an explosion of ways in which countries can engage in destructive behavior. The use of cyberspace as a venue of battle has changed the nature of conventional warfare. This poses problems in terms of response to ...
President Vladimir Putin in Russia, President Bashar Assad in Syria and President Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe are detested by many of their fellow countrymen who would like to see them overthrown and tried for human rights abuses. They depend on a close coterie of ...
The United States is now wrestling with the nuclear fears of two close allies — Israel and South Korea. Israel’s alarm at the prospect of Iran acquiring a nuclear weapon is existential in nature. The same is true of South Korea, whose capital sits ...
As the conflict in Syria churns out a ghastly human carnage, diplomatic efforts to halt the violence are shadowed by last year’s intervention in the Libyan conflict, which resulted in a six-month-long military operation to topple a tyrant. So, when the U.N. Security Council ...
The world is being shaken by tectonic changes almost too numerous to count. The economic crisis is accelerating the degradation of international governance and supranational institutions amid a shift of economic and political power to Asia. Now, less than a quarter-century after Francis Fukuyama ...
A year after the devastating earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan on March 11, 2011, all but two of the country’s 54 nuclear reactors are shut down. The Japanese people remain confused, apprehensive and distrustful of government statements and reassurances. The future of the ...
The election of the once and future president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, tempts one to despair that the brief and inspiring political awakening in Russia over the past year was for naught. He has gotten his way — replacing his protege Dmitry ...
After decades of official neglect and mistrust, Turkey has taken several steps to ensure the rights of the country’s non-Muslim religious minorities, and thus guarantee that the rule of law is applied equally for all Turkish citizens, regardless of individuals’ religion, ethnicity or language. ...
He did it again. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin won another presidential election. While the outcome was no surprise, neither was the controversy that greeted his victory. Despite Mr. Putin’s claim that he won “an open and honest fight,” the opposition has charged that ...
Before the scandalous presidential election of 1996, the situation was clear-cut and critical. A victory by Gennady Zyuganov over Boris Yeltsin would have meant an old-style Communists’ revenge for their defeat in the August 1991 putsch as well as a strong drive toward renationalization ...
Few people, least of all Prime Minister Vladimir Putin — who plans to return to Russia’s presidency on March 4 — could have imagined last December that Russians would, for the first time in 20 years, wake up and rally in their tens of ...