After weeks of calls by the Japanese government to do something about deflation and the fast appreciating yen, the Bank of Japan held an emergency meeting Tuesday — and decided what the world's second largest economy needs is more money. Central bank governor Masaaki Shirakawa announced steps to step up monetary easing by injecting 10 trillion yen into Japan's financial system. Shirakawa told reporters that these steps could be considered "quantitative easing in a broad sense." The eight-member ...

When Iranian Shirin Ebadi won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003 for her work as a lawyer and human-rights activist, the regime in Tehran faced a dilemma. The award infuriated the country's hard-liners, but the regime privately acknowledged that it had also earned Ebadi the admiration of most Iranians. Reluctant to arrest or openly target such a popular figure, the government tolerated Ebadi's activities and limited itself to low-level harassment of her legal office. That tacit policy has now ...

The uproar in the medical community was immediate. In a reversal of standard practice that bewildered physicians and patients around the nation, an independent government panel this week abandoned its long-standing recommendation that healthy women over age 40 get a breast-cancer screen once every year or two years. The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force began advising women instead to delay regular screening until age 50, and even then, to get tested only every other year. The American Cancer Society ...

The fall of the Berlin wall caught the world by surprise. For months, East Germany's beleaguered communist rulers had tried in vain to silence a growing opposition movement and stem the tide of people pouring out of the country. On the night of Nov. 9, 1989, an East German official held a press conference to announce new government travel policies but inadvertently announced that crossings to the West would be opened "without delay." Within hours, thousands of East Berliners ...

Confronted by growing evidence that sex between men is a significant driver of new HIV infections, the Kenyan government has shed a long-time refusal to acknowledge the existence of homosexuality and will launch a survey of gay attitudes and behaviors in its three biggest cities next year. The project is considered a landmark because the government and the vast majority of Kenyan people have long refused to address homosexuality in the fight against AIDS. Sex between men is illegal ...

Diva Beyonce Knowles strutting her stuff in the conservative Middle East?Al Arabiya reported that organizers, seeking to avoid a similar fate for Beyonce, decided to hold her concert hundreds of miles away from Cairo at a thinly populated Red Sea resort. Beyonce's world tour, which continues until next March, has already run afoul of conservative Islam. She postponed her October 25 concert in Malaysia after the Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party called for the Kuala Lumpur show to be scrapped because it ...

In some of the photos, the young children are wearing bibs and slight smiles can be seen on their chubby faces.International military forces have been treating the case as a "potential hijacking," Lt. Ian Jones of Britain's Royal Navy told CNN Tuesday. "We have no confirmation that anything has been pirated," he added. There are many possibilities, he said, adding he was aware of the reports of piracy but that hijacking was "far from certain." Britain's Foreign Office issued ...

How soon we forget. Surely the tragic deaths of 14 American service members and civilians in helicopter crashes serves to underscore why Afghanistan matters. For all the debate happening away from the battlefield, here are a couple of important questions:Ban said he was assured by Kai Eide, the top U.N. official in Afghanistan, that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had instructed his Interior Ministry to strengthen security, and he said the United Nations would do likewise -- in Kabul as ...

China is preparing to launch a trade investigation into whether US carmakers are being unfairly subsidised by the US government, according to people familiar with the matter."I looked outside of the gym and I saw 12 to 15 guys, sitting there, with no IDs," Baker said at the hearing. "The officers -- not only did they not check the IDs of those students or men sitting outside of of our campus, but the security officers who are employed here did ...

There is a well-known saying in Afghanistan: "You can rent an Afghan, but you can't buy him.""There's been an amnesty program for low-level Taliban in place for many years now and thousands of people have taken advantage of it," he said. "So this is not entirely a new idea. The idea of bribing people, local guys, to come over. ... It's one of the most cost-effective ways to get people to lay down their arms, either to negotiate a peace ...