MTV’s Naked Calculation Gone Bad What if one day you went to work and there was a meeting to discuss whether the project you were working on crossed the line into child pornography? You’d probably think you had ended up in the wrong room. …

Facebook Wins Relatively Few Friends in Japan With Mixi in its seventh year, it is starting “to feel old,” said Mitsuyo Nakata, a Web designer. Its growth has slowed, as have advertising revenue and investor confidence. Profits have fallen…

Japan Keeps a High Wall for Foreign Labor The country is losing its allure even for wide-eyed fans of its cutting-edge technology, its pop culture and the seemingly endless business opportunities its developed consumer society appears to o…

Southern Sudan Feels Freedom Close at Hand The south produces around 75 percent of Sudan’s oil, but it is landlocked, so some arrangement will have to be struck for southern oil to keep flowing through the pipeline in the north. The border…

City Board Names First Asian Mayor of San Francisco SAN FRANCISCO — After weeks of debate — and often open verbal combat — the San Francisco Board of Supervisors effectively elected Edwin M. Lee, the city administrator, as its new mayor on…

In Japan, Pfizer Is Short of Drug to Help Smokers The tax increase should also have been a bonanza for Pfizer, the world’s biggest pharmaceutical company, which makes the leading drug to help smokers break the habit. Instead, it became a m…

In Giant’s Story, a New Chapter on DNA He was a giant of a man, 7 feet 7 inches tall, who left his home in Ireland when he was 19 and traveled to London to make his fortune as a freak. There Charles Byrne, known as the Irish Giant, garnere…

More Schools Embracing iPad as Learning Tool A growing number of schools across the nation are embracing the iPad as the latest tool to teach Kafka in multimedia, history through “Jeopardy”-like games and math with step-by-step animation o…

Goldman Offering Clients a Chance to Invest in Facebook Goldman Sachs has reached out to its wealthy private clients, offering them a chance to invest in Facebook, the hot social networking giant that is considering a possible public offer…

Diplomats Help Push Sales of Jetliners on the Global Market WASHINGTON — The king of Saudi Arabia wanted the United States to outfit his personal jet with the same high-tech devices as Air Force One. The president of Turkey wanted the Obam…

Spiritual Seeker With a Taste For the Satirical An ant goes round and round without rest Like all beings in the six realms of existence, Born here and dying there without release, Now becoming a hungry ghost, then an animal. If you are sea…

In Kanazawa, Japan, Ancient Beauty Fuses With Modern Art ON a sunny early November afternoon in the Japanese city of Kanazawa, the alchemy of autumn had already begun transforming the city’s beloved Kenrokuen Garden from an oasis of leafy …

Hurdles Emerge in Rising Effort to Rate Teachers “If I thought they gave accurate information, I would take them more seriously,” the principal of P.S. 321, Elizabeth Phillips, said about the rankings. “But some of my best teachers have th…

Economists See Signs of Stronger Recovery Eighteen months after the recession officially ended, the government’s latest measures to bolster the economy have led many forecasters and policy makers to express new optimism that the recovery w…

U.S. Approved Business With Blacklisted Nations Despite sanctions and trade embargoes, over the past decade the United States government has allowed American companies to do billions of dollars in business with Iran and other countries bla…

Home-Stretch Buying Lifts Merchants’ Spirits The last-minute holiday surge is heralding the return of the American consumer, who is shedding the recession’s thrifty ways and rediscovering the pleasure of shopping. The malls are jammed, par…

Google Launches New Book Database With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibiliti…

The Implants Loophole A recently recalled artificial hip made by a unit of Johnson & Johnson, designed to last 15 years or more, is failing worldwide at unusually high rates after just a few years. One of the most troubled orthopedic impla…

Japan Plans Military Shift to Focus More on China In what would be a sweeping overhaul of its cold war-era defense strategy, Japan is about to release new military guidelines that would reduce its heavy armored and artillery forces pointed…

Using Waste, Swedish City Shrinks Its Fossil Fuel Use When this city vowed a decade ago to wean itself from fossil fuels, it was a lofty aspiration, like zero deaths from traffic accidents or the elimination of childhood obesity. But Krist…

Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators In a speech to a college audience in North Carolina, President Obama recalled how the Soviet Union’s 1957 launching of Sputnik provoked the United States to increase investment in math and scien…

Service Members Face New Threat: Identity Theft The government warns Americans to closely guard their Social Security numbers. But it has done a poor job of protecting those same numbers for millions of people: the nation’s soldiers, sailo…

The Ghost of Kyoto Visits Cancún CANCÚN, Mexico – There might have been some hope among parties seeking a new international climate agreement that sunny skies and azure seas would brighten treaty negotiations after the darkness and chill o…

After 30 Years, Times Square Rebirth Is Complete “So often, people say New York can’t build large-scale projects anymore,” said Lynne B. Sagalynn, a professor of real estate finance at Columbia University and the author of “Times Square Ro…

Agency Proposes ‘Do Not Track’ Option for Web Users Saying that online companies have failed to protect the privacy of Internet users, the Federal Trade Commission recommended a broad framework for commercial use of Web consumer data, incl…

U.S. Expands Role of Diplomats in Spying Ronald E. Neumann, a former American ambassador to Afghanistan, Algeria and Bahrain, said that Washington was constantly sending requests for voluminous information about foreign countries. But he s…

M.B.A.’s in Japan Struggle for Respect But, partly in an effort to counter those perceptions, some business schools themselves are working to make their M.B.A. degrees more relevant. Administrators of Japanese business schools like Hitotsu…

Luxury Retailer Is Suspicious of the Intentions of Another Proving Fran Lebowitz’s oft-cited dictum that “you’re only as good as your last haircut,” authentic-looking barbershops have popped up all over lower Manhattan. Done up with, say, …

Japan Pushing the Mob Out of Businesses TOKYO —When the toasts are raised here next year at the opening of the world’s tallest communications tower, yakuza gangsters will not be celebrating. The yakuza, as members of Japan’s criminal under…

Cheap and Collectible, This Year’s Hot Toy Is Squinkies In the eight years since he founded Blip Toys, Mr. Nichols has had enough success with novelty items that he can get meetings with Target, Toys “R” Us and Wal-Mart. From Wal-Mart, he …