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A meeting of the Lao-Lao liquor cooperative held in the village of Xai in Attapeu Province in June.
JAPAN / Society
Aug 19, 2024

Co-op Okinawa nurtures Laos farmers' cooperatives to encourage growth

By setting up cooperatives, farmers can prevent unfavorable price negotiations by sharing information with one another.
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) on Aug. 8
BUSINESS / Tech
Aug 15, 2024

Hedge funds race to tailor ChatGPT for time-consuming research chores

Fast-money proponents remain steadfast in their conviction that their investments will reap tangible wins.
Satish Sethi
COMMUNITY / The Big Questions
Sep 24, 2024

Emirates works to fly better, cleaner and smarter

Born in New Delhi, he joined Emirates in 2001 where he developed an international career until becoming Emirates’ country manager for Japan in 2021
Morinari Watanabe speaks during an interview on Wednesday in Tokyo
OLYMPICS
Sep 28, 2024

IOC presidential candidate Watanabe vows to update Olympics

Watanabe, 65, said he is seeking the IOC's top post with the believe that "there are things that must be done for children and the athletes who perform in Olympic Games."
The U.S. team celebrates after winning the Presidents Cup in Montreal on Sunday.
MORE SPORTS / Golf
Sep 30, 2024

U.S. tops Internationals to continue Presidents Cup dominance

The U.S. team featured 12 of the world's 25 top-ranked players and won fights late in matches to continue its domination of the event.
Knowing how Earth’s temperature behaved deep in the past can also help scientists test climate models that predict the future.
COMMENTARY / World
Sep 30, 2024

We just got a wake-up call from the time before dinosaurs

The die-offs happen when the Earth’s temperature changes too rapidly for organisms to evolve and adapt — as is starting to happen now.
Iwao Hakamata (left) gestures beside his older sister, Hideko, at a gathering with supporters on Monday in the city of Shizuoka, his first public appearance since his exoneration over a 1966 murder case.
JAPAN / Society
Oct 15, 2024

Ex-boxer Hakamata set to vote for the first time in decades

Efforts are being made to allow the world's longest-held death row inmate, who has been exonerated over a 1966 murder case, to vote in the Oct. 27 general election.
Kamala Harris speaks during a CNN Town Hall in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.
WORLD / Politics
Oct 24, 2024

Harris calls Trump a fascist in bid to sharpen 2024 contrast

The town hall comes amid a frenzied media and campaign blitz less than two weeks before Election Day.
Donald Trump, the then-Republican presidential candidate and now the president-elect, visits the U.S.-Mexico border at Eagle Pass, Texas, in February. His appointments to key positions in his new administration show he is moving aggressively on mass deportations of undocumented immigrants.
COMMENTARY / World
Nov 19, 2024

Trump's mass deportation plan has its leaders in place

Even before Trump’s victory, Tom Homan, the former acting director for ICE, promised to "run the biggest deportation operation this country's ever seen.”
Motohisa Furukawa, Democratic Party for the People tax chief, says the Bank of Japan is unlikely to move so quickly in raising rates that the move would have a detrimental impact on public borrowing costs.
BUSINESS / Economy
Nov 28, 2024

BOJ rate hike unlikely to derail budget planning, DPP tax chief says

Democratic Party for the People tax chief Motohisa Furukawa says it is "unthinkable” that the Bank of Japan will hike rates rapidly.
Customers enter Aeon's Shinagawa Seaside store in Tokyo for a Black Friday sale in 2022.
LIFE / Language / BILINGUAL
Nov 29, 2024

Master this double negative to better express your Black Friday urges

What better time to learn how to say you can't resist a deal than on a weekend of discounted shopping.
"Agent" technology goes further than chatbots, not just performing parlor tricks and spitting out plausible responses to queries but actually doing the kinds of repetitive tasks that today are handled by millions of humans.
BUSINESS / Tech
Dec 14, 2024

Big Tech's new AI obsession: 'Agents' that do your work for you

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls agents "the next giant breakthrough," while Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says the shift "is really the rise of digital labor.”
Gifting secondhand used to have a bad rap, but it doesn’t carry the taboo it once did.
BUSINESS
Dec 14, 2024

How to buy a secondhand gift someone might actually want

Gifting secondhand used to have a bad rap, but thanks to more environmentally conscious consumers, it doesn’t carry the taboo it once did.
Stuttgart's Anrie Chase applauds the fans after a match against Bayer Leverkusen on Nov. 1.
SOCCER
Dec 29, 2024

How Anrie Chase went from a Fukushima high school to playing against Real Madrid

Just three years ago, the Stuttgart defender was still playing for Shoshi High School in Koriyama. Now he's competing against the likes of Kylian Mbappe.
An undated photo of a poster in a window promoting shows at Lincoln Center by Shen Yun, which in its 2023-2024 season performed more than 800 times on five continents, in New York. Over the past decade, the dance group Shen Yun Performing Arts has made money at a staggering rate in large part by getting followers of the Falun Gong religious movement to work for free and pay its bills.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Dec 31, 2024

How Shen Yun tapped religious fervor to make $266 million

Shen Yun’s success flows in part from its ability to pack venues worldwide — while exploiting young, low-paid performers with little regard for their health or well-being.
Australia captain Pat Cummins (left) receives the trophy after clinching the series on Day 3 of the fifth test match against India in Sydney on Sunday.
MORE SPORTS / Cricket
Jan 6, 2025

Pat Cummins expresses pride after Australia tops India to win 'everything'

The six-wicket victory in the fifth test in Sydney also secured the right to defend the World Test Championship (WTC) title against South Africa at Lord's in June.
Those who lived in Japan’s Nara Period, which lasted from the year 710 to 794, by and large knew themselves to be blessed. It wasn’t just those in power who felt it, either. From nobles to commoners, the poets seemed to have democratized joy itself.
JAPAN / History / The Living Past
Jan 17, 2025

From Genji to 'hikikomori,' how we make peace with disappearing

Japan’s reverence for impermanence reveals a profound connection between beauty and loss, from poetic musings to spiritual retreats, echoing in modern expressions of solitude.
Japan is facing challenges with Donald Trump's new tariffs and is considering increased purchases of U.S. goods, negotiating tariff reductions and expanding auto production in the U.S. to reduce the trade deficit and avoid further economic tension.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Apr 8, 2025

What is Japan's play on Trump's tariffs?

Japan had expected some consideration for being the largest source of foreign direct investment in the U.S. from 2019 to 2024, with total investment of around $860 billion.
The Bank of Japan signals rate-hike uncertainty and slashes growth forecasts amid rising trade and inflation concerns, as the central bank's earlier optimism is upended by U.S. President Trump's tariff moves.
COMMENTARY / Japan
May 2, 2025

Bank of Japan will struggle to justify hikes after this

Few anticipated how dovish the BOJ would sound on the future direction of rates or how gloomy it would be on the near-term prospects for achieving the inflation goal.
Rory McIlroy watches his shot during a practice round for the PGA Championship in Charlotte, North Carolina, on Tuesday.
MORE SPORTS / Golf
May 15, 2025

Relaxed Rory McIlroy unburdened by pressure to chase 'north star'

The 36-year-old is still a force wherever he tees it up, but even he finds it hard to imagine anything that could top what he achieved at Augusta National in April.
Knicks center Karl-Anthony Towns dunks during his team's win over the Pacers in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference finals in New York on Wednesday.
BASKETBALL / NBA
May 30, 2025

Knicks rout Pacers to keep season alive and force Game 6

Jalen Brunson and Karl-Anthony Towns combined for 56 points in New York's win.
A dead sea star in 2015. About 5 billion sea stars died from a disease outbreak, likely including this one.
ENVIRONMENT / Climate change
Jun 18, 2025

Marine heat waves are spreading around the world

Some unusual ocean events have become so intense that scientists have coined a new term: super marine heat waves.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa in Riyadh on May 14.
WORLD / Politics
Jul 1, 2025

Trump lifts U.S. sanctions on Syria in bid to boost new government

The order removes various sanctions on Syria, effective July 1, while keeping those on former President Bashar Assad.
Israeli-American businessman Moti Kahana holds a flag during a mission to evacuate 200 Jews in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, in March 2022.
WORLD / Politics
Jul 13, 2025

How a U.S. mission to push a Trump deal in Congo unraveled

The story of the ill-fated venture, which has not previously been reported, provides a glimpse of how the Trump administration is prepared to work through unconventional channels.
A serviceman of the 57th Separate Motorized Infantry Brigade of the Ukrainian Armed Forces works with an Mk 19 U.S.-made automatic grenade launcher near the front-line town of Vovchansk in Ukraine's Kharkiv region, on March 13.
WORLD / Politics
Jul 16, 2025

Europeans open to buying U.S. arms for Ukraine under Trump plan but need details

Much of the plan remains undisclosed, including the amounts and precise types of weapons to be provided, how quickly they would be supplied and how they would be paid for.
U.S. President Donald Trump meets with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the start of bilateral talks during the Group of 20 summit in Osaka in June 2019.
ASIA PACIFIC / Politics
Jul 22, 2025

Aides to Trump and Xi discussed autumn U.S.-China leaders' meeting

Ideas floated include a Trump stopover around the time of an APEC summit in South Korea or talks on the sidelines of the Oct. 30-Nov. 1 event.
Seven & I Holdings says it will open 1,300 new international stores and add 1,000 net new outlets in Japan.
BUSINESS / Companies
Aug 6, 2025

Seven & I sets expansion targets to win back investor confidence

Stephen Dacus, who took over as chief executive officer earlier this year, is under pressure to deliver on a plan to streamline Seven & I around convenience stores.
Nadeshiko Japan reached the knockout stage at a fourth consecutive FIFA Women's World Cup before being eliminated in the quarterfinals on Friday by Sweden.
SOCCER / Women's World cup / From the Spot
Aug 15, 2023

Bold steps needed from JFA, WE League to maintain momentum after WWC

After Nadeshiko Japan's inspiring quarterfinal run in New Zealand, the country's soccer bodies must avoid the missteps of the post-2011 boom and bust.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken meets with the Chinese Communist Party's foreign policy chief, Wang Yi, on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Jakarta on July 13.
COMMENTARY / Japan
Aug 16, 2023

Southeast Asia uses great power competition to dodge failures

The U.S. needs to rethink its approach toward Southeast Asia, counter China's narrative, and engage in effective public diplomacy.
A child stands in front of the Hibiya Music Hall, which collapsed during the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake.
PODCAST / deep dive
Aug 31, 2023

The earthquake that turned Tokyo to ash

This week we commemorate the 100-year anniversary of the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Longform

Figure skater Akiko Suzuki was once told her ideal weight should be 47 kilograms, a number she now admits she “naively believed.” This led to her have a relationship with food that resulted in her suffering from anorexia.
The silent battle Japanese athletes fight with weight