As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic continues to limit the number of foreign workers entering Japan, new government data has revealed that the nation’s population contracted by a record four hundred twenty thousand people last year.

That hefty figure shattered the previous mark of nearly three hundred thirty thousand, which was set just the year prior, and continued the downward trend seen over the past decade.

According to the Health Ministry, Japan’s population now sits at roughly one hundred twenty-six million.

The 60% decrease in the number of foreign workers entering the East Asian nation over the past year has been largely blamed for the sharp drop in the population.

Even with the pandemic cutting jobs across many sectors, many companies and small businesses, including those in the hard-hit restaurant and hotel industries, have reported consistent labor shortages.

A severe snowstorm started affecting northern Japan on Tuesday, February 16, 2021, causing flooding and transport disruptions. The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) warned it could become the most powerful blizzard in years and cause whiteout conditions through Wednesday, February 17.

A rapidly developed low pressure system is advancing westward over the Sea of Okhotsk, bringing extremely strong winds and causing storm surge that already flooded many homes in western parts of Hokkaido.

Wind gusts of up to 162 km/h (101 mph) were recorded at Cape Erimo, Hokkaido, 135 km/h (84 mph) in Sakata city, Yamagata Prefecture, and 111 km/h (69 mph) in Akita City, Tohoku.

The blizzard triggered the closure of nearly 600 schools, the cancelation of about 70 flights, and the disruption of more than 200 train services, according to the Kyodo News.

Japan often suffers earthquakes, as it is located within the Ring of Fire - a notorious area in the Pacific Ocean with extremely high seismic activity.

A powerful earthquake measuring 7.1 on the Richter scale jolted the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, the United States Geological Survey reported on Saturday.

The United States military has kicked off joint war games with Australian and Japan on the Western Pacific island of Guam which will specifically focus on countering a theoretical future aerial attack from Russia or China.

The joint exercises, dubbed 'Cope North 2021' began last Wednesday and are scheduled to run all the way to February 19. Crucially the exercises will included F-35A joint strike fighters, marking the first time the advanced stealth jets are deployed to Andersen Air Force Base at Guam.

"Exercise Cope North 21 aims to provide an opportunity for the forces to hone their combined air tactics while enhancing support to the Indo-Pacific region," according to a US military statement. "Australia is participating for the 11th time in the US Pacific Air Forces’ largest multilateral exercise."

The US has proposed the first summit between the leaders of the “Quad” group, media reports said on Sunday, as the new administration looks to strengthen a framework that some observers believe could develop into a “mini-Nato” designed to counter China’s growing power in the Asia-Pacific.

Washington has already proposed an online meeting with the leaders of Australia, India and Japan, the Japanese news agency Kyodo reported on Sunday.

Joe Biden’s administration has already said it will build on the previous administration’s work in setting up the group, one of the few Donald Trump policies it has decided to continue.

National security adviser Jake Sullivan said last week that the White House sees the Quad as “fundamental, a foundation upon which to build substantial American policy in the Indo-Pacific region”.

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin spoke with Japan’s defense minister for the first time and reaffirmed Washington’s commitment to defending Japanese sovereignty over the Senkaku Islands, or Diaoyu Islands as they are known in China.

The Senkakus are uninhabited islands in the East China Sea that are currently administered by Japan but are also claimed by China and Taiwan. After Austin spoke on the phone with Japanese Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi on Saturday, the Pentagon released a readout of the call.

“Secretary Austin further affirmed that the Senkaku Islands are covered by Article V of the US-Japan Security Treaty, and that the United States remains opposed to any unilateral attempts to change the status quo in the East China Sea,” the readout says.

Article V is the section of the US-Japan Security Treaty that outlines the mutual defense agreement between the two countries. The US will come to the defense of Japan if any territory administered by Tokyo is under attack.

Monthly suicide rates in Japan increased by 16 percent from July to October 2020 compared to the same period the previous year, Japanese researchers have found. The three-month interval coincided with Japan’s second wave of Chinese coronavirus outbreaks, Reuters reported Sunday.

Published by researchers at Tokyo’s Metropolitan Institute of Gerontology and Hong Kong University in the scientific journal Nature Human Behavior on January 15, the study found a larger increase in the suicide rates “among females (37 percent) and children and adolescents (49 percent).”

Japan has been hit by severe snow storms, killing at least eight people and bringing parts of the country to a standstill.

The snowfall in the Hokuriku region is more than double the average expected for this time of year.

The New York State Department of Financial Services, the Bitlicense regulator, has authorized GMO to issue U.S. dollar and Japanese yen-pegged stablecoins. The latter “will be the first of its kind available to the public.” To date, the regulator has given out 27 charters and licenses for companies engaged in crypto activities.

First Regulated Yen Stablecoin Approved in NY

The New York State Department of Financial Services (DFS) has granted a charter under New York Banking Law to GMO-z.com Trust Company Inc., a subsidiary of the Japanese giant GMO Internet. This enables the company to operate as a limited liability trust company, the regulator announced Tuesday, elaborating:

They resemble small fragments of charcoal, but the soil samples collected from an asteroid and returned to Earth by a Japanese spacecraft were hardly disappointing.

The samples Japanese space officials described Thursday are as big as 1 centimeter (0.4 inch) and rock hard, not breaking when picked up or poured into another container. Smaller black, sandy granules the spacecraft collected and returned separately were described last week.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft got the two sets of samples last year from two locations on the asteroid Ryugu, more than 300 million kilometers (190 million miles) from Earth. It dropped them from space onto a target in the Australian Outback, and the samples were brought to Japan in early December.

Last week, a US Navy guided-missile destroyer held anti-submarine warfare drills with a French submarine and a Japanese carrier in the Philippine Sea. The drill was a rare joint exercise with France in the Pacific and is a sign of things to come as both the US and its European allies are looking to counter China in the region.

“Although one of the US’s long-standing allies, it is a rare opportunity for US Navy maritime forces to conduct operations with their French Navy counterparts in the Seventh Fleet area of operations,” The US Navy’s Seventh Fleet said in a statement. The fleet is based out of Japan and operates across the Indo-Pacific region.

Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the US, Japan, and France will hold their first joint land and sea military exercises in May 2021. In comments to Japan’s Sankei newspaper, a French naval leader made it clear that the future exercises are aimed at Beijing.

ON FEBRUARY 21, 2019, Japanese astronomers performed a theft that made history. A Japanese spacecraft touched down on asteroid Ryugu, quickly snatched a piece of the space rock and fled the scene.

The act was caught on camera, and in May of this year, scientists from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency released the footage, giving us our first up-close-and-personal encounter with the surface of an asteroid. As the year comes to a close, researchers around the world are starting to look forward to getting even closer — by analyzing the sample itself.

Communities have been isolated, 10,000 households have suffered power outages and 1,000 cars got stuck. The country's meteorological agency has issued warnings for avalanches and further disruptions in several areas.

Around 1,000 cars have been stranded in a snowstorm in Japan, according to local media. The vehicles were stuck on the Kan-Etsu Expressway between Tsukiyono town and Yuzawa town, north of Tokyo, Kyodo News reported on Thursday.

About 200 vehicles were also temporarily stuck in heavy snow on another expressway.

The snowfall also cut off power to about 10,000 households.

President Roosevelt (FDR) provoked the attack, knew about it in advance and covered up his failure to warn the Hawaiian commanders. FDR needed the attack to sucker Hitler to declare war, since the public and Congress were overwhelmingly against entering the war in Europe. It was his backdoor to war.

FDR blinded the commanders at Pearl Harbor and set them up by -

denying intelligence to Hawaii (HI) on Nov 27, misleading the commanders into thinking negotiations with Japan were continuing to prevent them from realizing the war was on

having false information sent to HI about the location of the Japanese carrier fleet.

One week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, a US Navy listening post on the other side of Oahu intercepted Admiral Yamamoto's message to the AJapanese fleet to sail to Hawaii. Today, the remains of that radio station can still be seen.

Today is the 79th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the event that brought the US into the war against Germany and Japan. Eight American battleships were sunk or put out of action, and about 3,600 American sailors were killed or wounded.

Washington needed scapegoats, and Admiral Husband Kimmel and General Walter Short were saddled with the blame for American unpreparedness for the Pearl Harbor attack. As time passed circumstantial evidence came to light that President Roosevelt knew of the attack and permitted the devastation in order that the American people would be so outraged by the attack as to give up their resistance to being dragged into another European war. The controversy continued for some years. I am unsure that it was ever resolved.

A Japanese capsule carrying the world's first asteroid subsurface samples shot across the night atmosphere early Sunday before landing in the remote Australian Outback, completing a mission to provide clues to the origin of the solar system and life on Earth.

The spacecraft Hayabusa2 released the small capsule on Saturday and sent it toward Earth to deliver samples from a distant asteroid. At about 10 kilometers (6 miles) aboveground, a parachute was opened to slow its fall and beacon signals were transmitted to indicate its location in the sparsely populated area of Woomera in southern Australia.

Early on Sunday morning, the skies above a secluded military complex in central Australia will be brightened by a fireball plummeting to Earth. It will be a flamboyant homecoming for the sample return capsule from Hayabusa2, a Japanese spacecraft launched almost exactly six years ago on a mission to shoot an ancient asteroid and steal some of its dirt. If the capsule survives its fiery descent, its payload of pristine space rock will help scientists understand the earliest days of our solar system, shed light on the mysterious origins of meteorites, and may even provide clues about the emergence of life on Earth.

Russian citizens of the disputed Kuril Islands are, according to US officials, actually Japanese – a result of the US’ policy of insisting much of the archipelago, governed by Moscow since World War II, rightly belongs to Tokyo.

Japanese newspaper Hokkaido Shimbun reported on Friday that Russians born on the islands of Habomai, Shikotan, Kunashir and Iturup are, for the purposes of drawing up green cards, considered Japanese by the US immigration authorities. The islands are, however, governed by Moscow and their 20,000 residents include people of Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Tartar descent, as well as an indigenous Ainu population.

A brightly burning meteor was seen plunging from the sky in wide areas of Japan, capturing attention on television and social media.

The meteor glowed strongly as it rapidly descended through the Earth's atmosphere on Sunday.

Many people in western Japan reported on social media seeing the rare sight, which lasted for a few seconds.

After a few months of low-level activity, a strong explosion took place at Japan's Sakurajima volcano at 02:55 UTC on December 2, 2020.

Part of the eruptive column was obscured by a meteorological cloud, making height estimate difficult.

Sakurajima's Volcanic Alert Level remains at 3 (do not approach the volcano) since February 5, 2016.

On July 1, 2020, a panel organized by the Japan Meteorological Agency warned Sakurajima may erupt on a larger scale sometime in the future.

The frequency of eruptions at Minamidake summit crater has been on the decrease, while the volume of volcanic ashes remains constant-- indicating that the upcoming eruption may be bigger than usual, JMA said.

Australia is using its formative military alliances as the only leverage it has in the worsening trade spat with China which has grown into a full-blown crisis for Aussie commodities exports.

It also comes after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo traveled to India and southeast Asian countries last month seeking to shore up coordinated regional resistance against Chinese economic and military influence and hegemony.

"Australia plans to sign a military exchange deal with U.S. ally Japan so troops from both sides could pool their firepower if needed to counter China, which has become enmeshed in disputes with Australia over the past two weeks," reports state-funded Voice of America.

Russia said on Tuesday it had deployed a number of its new S-300V4 missile defence systems for combat duty on a disputed chain of islands near Japan, a move that is likely to anger Tokyo.

The Russian Defence Ministry’s Zvezda TV station said the mobile air defence system designed to counter ballistic and aerial attacks was on Iturup, one of four islands held by Russia that Japan claims and calls the Northern Territories.

“Short-range anti-aircraft missile systems are already on duty on the island of Iturup in Sakhalin Region. Now the air defence ‘heavy artillery’ has arrived. The so-called large air defence system: the S-300V4,” Zvezda said.

Russia's foreign ministry said Friday that it's lodged a formal protest with the United States over this week's incident in the Sea of Japan, calling it a "provocation designed to disturb the peace".

Russia further said Friday it's military won't hesitate to "respond" the next time the US Navy brazenly violates its maritime borders. During the Tuesday encounter a Russian warship was described as chasing the US destroyer out of the area.

"We warn the US not to repeat the violation. We reserve the right to respond in the future," a foreign ministry statement said.

The incident happened Tuesday and involved a Russian destroyer threatening to ram the USS John S McCain warship which the Kremlin alleged violated sovereign Russian waters by up to 2km:

The department clarified that the US Navy destroyer went 2 km beyond the border line, invading the territorial waters of the Russian Federation. The Russian military warned the Americans that they were ready for a ramming maneuver.

"The Admiral Vinogradov, a large anti-submarine ship of the Pacific Fleet, which is directly tracking the American destroyer, warned the foreign ship through the international communication channel about the inadmissibility of such actions and the possibility of using a ramming maneuver to force the intruder out of the territorial waters," the Defense Ministry said.

After that, the John McCain immediately went into neutral waters: "the American destroyer did not make repeated attempts to enter them."

Watch footage of the rare confrontation in the Sea of Japan below:

After his self-proclaimed victory as the new president-elect of the US, Joe Biden was congratulated by some heads of state and government. In this regard, on Wednesday (November 11), the Japanese Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, telephoned Biden with the intention of congratulating him on his victory and during the conversation they discussed several matters of strategic importance for both nations.

The American Democrat has strongly stated his commitment that the US will support Japan’s claims on the disputed Senkaku Islands. Biden and Suga also agreed to coordinate joint efforts related to several global challenges, such as combating the new coronavirus pandemic and global warming, as well as other environmental issues. However, the most important point is the issue of the islands due to the delicacy of the topic, which involves an old dispute between Japanese and Chinese.

Two weeks ago we detailed the latest flare-up in maritime tensions between Japan and China after Chinese ships intruded into the Japanese-claimed Senkaku Islands area in disputed East China Sea waters, staying for a record amount of time according to Japan's Defense Minister, who previously called the situation "intolerable".

The stakes have now been raised as of early this week given the head of US forces in Japan has said the Pentagon could send American troops to defend the Senkaku Islands from future Chinese aggression.

Host to 31 U.S. military bases, Okinawa, Japan’s southernmost prefecture, is no stranger to the risks of bearing the burden of the U.S.-Japan alliance. In 1959, the U.S. military accidentally shot a nuclear rocket into a local harbor; six years later, it lost a hydrogen bomb in nearby seas; then in 1969, a leak of nerve agent on the island so shocked the world that President Richard Nixon was forced to renounce his nation’s first-use policy on chemical weapons.

But these incidents pale compared to what Okinawans are facing today: the U.S. military has polluted the drinking water for 450,000 people – a third of the prefecture’s population – in the worst case of environmental contamination in the island’s history.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo continued his crusade against Beijing on Tuesday in a meeting with representatives from Japan, India, and Australia in Tokyo. Trump administration officials are openly considering formalizing an alliance with the four nations, known as the Quad, to counter China in the Pacific.

Ahead of the meeting, Pompeo delivered a speech directly calling out Beijing, something the representatives of the other countries avoided in their remarks.

“As partners in this Quad, it is more critical now than ever that we collaborate to protect our people and partners from the CCP’s [Beijing’s] exploitation, corruption and coercion,” Pompeo said. “We see it in the South and East China Seas, the Mekong, the Himalayas, the Taiwan Strait.”

Trump Administration officials have been saying this for weeks, but on Friday reiterated their intentions to try to enforce a UN Security Council resolution that includes broad sanctions against Iran. Officials say they expect every nation to comply.

The glaring problem with this is that the resolution doesn’t exist, at least not as an active resolution the US wants. The P5+1 nuclear deal gave the US the authority to reimpose sanctions on Iran, but the US had withdrawn from that pact years ago. Though the Trump Administration argued that didn’t matter, the UN has virtually unanimously rejected their interpretation, and rejected the UN Security Council resolution. The US believes the resolution becomes active Sunday, but the reality is it just doesn’t exist legally.

North Korea’s economic plight in the wake of the new coronavirus pandemic and natural disasters may give Japan’s next prime minister a chance to meet with the nuclear-armed country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, foreign affairs experts say.

As the global virus outbreak has stifled North Korea’s trade with its major economic ally of China and massive flooding triggered by powerful typhoons has devastated the agricultural sector, Kim could extend an olive branch to Japan to receive aid to rebuild the stagnant economy.

Outgoing Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has failed to resolve the issue of North Korea’s abduction of Japanese nationals in the 1970s and 1980s, but his successor, Yoshihide Suga, might push forward negotiations on it in a better way than his predecessor has done.

Outgoing Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has taken the Japanese defenses policy away from its post-war pacifism to a growing military with an increasingly loose sense of self-defense. A week before stepping down, he’s talking taking it a step farther.

Abe now says he wants Japan to have “first-strike” capabilities to attack enemy bases around the area. Abe argued that would increase deterrence, meaning this is the ultimate extension of “self-defense,” where the nation would be flagrantly attacking other countries and claiming defense.

Abe suggested intercepting missiles was no longer sufficient, and called for a new revised defense policy. With Japan’s two main rivals being China and North Korea, any Japanese first strikes would likely start a major war.

Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe bowed in apology today as he announced his resignation on health grounds after a record eight years in power.

Abe, 65, revealed he had suffered a relapse of a chronic bowel condition - saying he had 'lost a lot of my energy and strength' and would need regular medical treatment that would prevent him from tackling the coronavirus crisis.

'I have been struggling with my illness and I have to get treatment. Poor health should not lead to wrong political decisions,' he told a press conference, offering his 'sincere apology' for abandoning ship during the pandemic.

Japan has scrapped the deployment of a multi-billion-dollar anti-missile system, the government confirmed Thursday, days after saying the program had been suspended.

Interceptors for the Aegis Ashore system were to be placed in two regions under the costly and controversial program.

But the government reversed course under pressure from local residents concerned about the risks posed by a missile defense system in their backyard.

Japan's asteroid-sampling mission is officially clear to return its precious cargo to Australia in December, according to statements from both countries' governments.

The Hayabusa2 spacecraft is trekking back to Earth with a sample capsule full of material snagged from a near-Earth asteroid called Ryugu. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), which runs the mission, has long planned to deposit that capsule in the vast desert of Australia, but the new announcement marks that country's official approval of the plan.

In an implicit message to China, the Japanese and U.S. militaries teamed up this week for a number of joint exercises involving warships, heavy bombers, advanced fighter jets and an aircraft carrier in the waters and airspace near Japan.

The scale and tempo of the multiple joint exercises was noticeably large and came as Sino-U.S. tensions continued to spiral over security, economic and human rights concerns.

The United States and Japan are to jointly build a network of small satellites capable of detecting new missiles, as Tokyo warns of increasing threats from North Korea.

The purpose of the satellites would be to complement the currently existing system of missile defense, which includes Japan's PAC-3 missile interceptors, the Nikkei reported Wednesday.

A new defense white paper published by the Japanese Ministry of National Defense takes aim at Chinese expansionism and North Korean weapons tests, claiming they pose major threats to Tokyo. The paper claims Beijing is taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to further its regional ambitions.

The annual white paper, which the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe approved on Tuesday, criticizes Beijing for “relentlessly” challenging Tokyo’s control over the disputed Senkaku Islands, which China claims are its own and calls the Diaoyu Islands.

“Despite protests by our country, Chinese official ships repeatedly intruded into our territorial waters around the Senkaku Islands,” the paper said, according to Kyodo News Agency.

Joint exercises by the Indian and Japanese navies in the Indian Ocean at the weekend suggest the two countries are drawing closer to face what they perceive as a common threat from China, analysts say.

While joint military exercises involving the two countries are not uncommon, the latest activity comes amid tensions both are experiencing with Beijing.
Indian and Chinese troops remain locked in a face-off along the disputed Himalayan border where 20 Indian soldiers were killed in a recent clash with their Chinese counterparts, while Japan and China are locked in a war of words over a Japanese move to change the administrative status of the Senkaku Islands, which China claims and refers to as the Diaoyu Islands.

okyo has aborted plans to go ahead with the Aegis Ashore missile defense sites, having deemed them both unsafe and too costly. Its alternative to the defensive option is quite the opposite: striking enemy firing positions first.
Following “deliberations” at Japan’s National Security Council, the government decided “to cancel the [Aegis] deployment in the Yamaguchi and Akita prefectures,” Defense Minister Taro Kono told ruling Liberal Democratic Party members on Thursday.

He said it had borne in mind the ballooning costs of the $4.1 billion contract signed with the US to build, supply, and maintain the two Aegis Ashore sites during their 30-year lifespan. The central government also seems to have listened to the views of local politicians and residents in Akita and Yamaguchi, who feared the Aegis launch sites would make their neighborhoods the target of a retaliatory strike in an all-out conflict.

Japan is about to hit Covid Cover Uppers China with a massive manufacturing exodus following the Coronavirus pandemic that has brought the world to its knees.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has proposed “building an economy that is less dependent on one country, China, so that the nation can better avoid supply chain disruptions.” reports Nikkei Asia Review.

Hospitals in Japan are increasingly turning away sick people as the country struggles with surging coronavirus infections and its emergency medical system collapses.

In one recent case, an ambulance carrying a man with a fever and difficulty breathing was rejected by 80 hospitals and forced to search for hours for a hospital in downtown Tokyo that would treat him. Another feverish man finally reached a hospital after paramedics unsuccessfully contacted 40 clinics.

The Japanese Association for Acute Medicine and the Japanese Society for Emergency Medicine say many hospital emergency rooms are refusing to treat people including those suffering strokes, heart attacks and external injuries.

Long gone are the days when central banks pretended they aren't in the business of propping up the stock market.

A week after we reported that the BOJ had bought a record amount of ETFs in a desperate attempt to stabilize its illiquid stock market, where the central bank now owns over 73% of all ETFs, Kuroda bought a whopping 121.6BN yen of ETFs on Tuesday, the most on record, and just one day after the BOJ doubled the upper limit of ETFs it can purchase to 12 trillion yen, without however answering where it will get all those ETFs from.

The purchases in its core ETF program jumped by 20% to 120.4BN yen from the previous record of 100.2BN yen; while ETFs bought in the BOJ's "physical and human capital" program - whereby the BOJ directly admits it is rewarding companies for pursuing policies that it finds appealing such as higher jobs - remain at 1.2b yen. Finally, the BOJ's J-REIT purchases rose to 1.5BN yen from 1.2BN yen.

Japan's Olympic torch relay may be scaled back because of the coronavirus outbreak, organisers admitted today amid growing doubts about the Games.

The symbolic torch is due to arrive in Japan next month before it is taken on a 121-day journey past some of the country's most famous landmarks.

Chief executive Toshiro Muto says the relay will go ahead but admitted that 'we'd like to think about how to implement it while preventing the spread of infection, including scaling down'.

With half of China's population facing some level of travel restriction due to the coronavirus outbreak, the Politburo's attempt to get the country back to work has been slow going and fraught with setbacks.

Much of the coverage so far has lingered on Apple's supply woes and warnings by companies as diverse as automakers and textiles firms about supply chain disruptions tied to factory closures in China. But China isn't the only country facing serious economic blowback from the outbreak.

The Japanese professor Kentaro Iwata, an epidemiologist at the University Hospital of Kobe University, spent a day at the Diamond Princess as a volunteer. In multiple YouTube videos, he strongly criticized government policy.

“The cruise ship was completely inadequate in terms of controlling infections,” he said in one of them.

“There was not a single infection control professional on the ship, nor anyone professionally involved in infection prevention. The bureaucrats were in charge of everything.”

“There is no clear distinction between the green (healthy) zones and the red (potentially infected) zones. And the staff is running back and forth,” Iwata reported.

Japanese health authorities are beginning the process of offloading the remaining 2,000+ passengers and crew aboard the 'Diamond Princess', a ship that has been under quarantine for 14 days.

The offloading will take place in phases over three days, finally wrapping up on Friday. The first 500 people are set to leave at around 10:30 am Tokyo time on Wednesday. There will be no preference given to different nationalities, according to Japan's Ministry of Health.

Many who depart will be subject to another 14 days of quarantine, including any Americans who elected to stay on the ship instead of traveling back to the US on the evac flight. Roughly 40 Americans were also excluded from that flight because they were being treated for the virus in a Japanese hospital.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Friday briefed Iranian President Hassan Rouhani on Tokyo’s plan to send naval forces to the Middle East to protect Japanese vessels, a Japanese official said, Reuters reports.

Rouhani said in response that he understood Japan’s intention to contribute to navigational safety, the official told a media briefing after the two leaders met in Tokyo.

“I’m highly concerned about tensions running high in the Middle East,” Abe told Rouhani at the start of the meeting.

Friction between Tehran and Washington has increased since last year when US President Donald Trump pulled the United States out of Tehran’s 2015 nuclear deal with six nations and re-imposed sanctions on the country, crippling its economy.

The Israeli government has increased discretionary spending on settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory by 50 per cent over the last two years, reported the Jerusalem Post.

According to data published by settlement watchdog Peace Now, so-called “discretionary spending” “is expenditure by various ministries outside the general budget, including from the Interior, Housing, Education, and Energy and Water ministries, as well as the National Roads Authority”.

These funds are directed towards the construction of settlement housing units, as well as for roads inside the settlements, “buildings for educational, social and religious purposes, commercial centres and industrial parks”, the report added.

SOURCE: MIDDLE EAST MONITOR
The Israeli government is aiming to increase the volume of Israel’s defence exports, reported Globes, which has revealed the main points of the plan for the first time.

The project, being overseen by the Defence Ministry’s International Defence Cooperation Directorate (SIBAT) led by Brigadier General (Res.) Yair Kulas, will begin to be rolled out in early 2020.

According to Globes, the plan is based on “focused seminars for senior commanders in foreign armies”, Israeli military “assistance for promoting sales of Israeli weapons”, and “subsidising small and medium-sized defence companies seeking to sell arms around the world”.

Speaking this week, Kulas said that SIBAT favours a major expansion of agreements between countries, resulting in significant deals for the large defence companies, especially Elbit Systems, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) and Rafael Advanced Defence Systems.

Ever since the new round of 'tanker wars' began in Strait of Hormuz in mid-June with a mysterious mine attack on multiple tankers, one involving a Japanese-owned ship, Tokyo has reportedly mulled sending a Japanese defense force to the area to help protect vital shipping lanes.

In a rare move, the pacifist nation appears ready to pull the trigger, as FT reports, citing chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, who indicated that "the government was planning to deploy forces in a region where a Japanese tanker, the Kokuka Courageous, was recently attacked with a limpet mine."

This is believed to be the earliest photograph from the ground, 15 minutes after the plutonium bomb detonated over Nagasaki. The destruction was so incredible that there is no count on how many people died that day. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki will forever live in the pages of history as two of the most significant turning points in modern history, initiating the world into the nuclear age.

MacArthur “…no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

“Albert Einstein…President Roosevelt would have forbidden the atomic bombing of Hiroshima had he been alive and that it was probably carried out to end the Pacific war before Russia could participate.”

On this day in 1945, the US military under the direction of President Truman dropped a nuclear bomb on a civilian target killing over 80,000 people instantly.

Was the attack on Hiroshima a military necessity?

No and here’s why.

Earlier, Tokyo lodged a protest over Russian military drills in the southern Kuril Islands, saying the exercises ran "counter to our position on these islands."

The Russian Foreign Ministry summoned Japanese Ambassador Toyohisa Kozuki on Tuesday, drawing attention to Japan's 'unacceptable' interference in Russia's internal affairs through its earlier protest to Russia over its activities in the southern Kuril Islands.

"The Russian side emphasised that Tokyo's comments regarding the visits of Russian officials to this part of the Sakhalin region, as well as various activitis carried out there, including of a socio-economic and military nature, border on an attempt to interfere in Russia's internal affairs," the Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The epicentre of the earthquake was located off the coast of Fukushima Prefecture at a depth of 50 kilometres.

A 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit north-eastern Japan at around 19:23 local time on Sunday, 4 August, according to the national meteorological service.

Japan’s cabinet voted to remove South Korea from its 'whitelist' of preferred trading partners, accusing Seoul of failing to adequately protect dual use materials, while alluding to other influences.

Seoul claims that Tokyo’s move responds to recent court decisions awarding damages to South Korean forced laborers of colonial Japanese corporations. Civil leaders calling for a boycott of Japanese goods and visits rallied outside the Japanese embassy Friday. South Korean President Moon Jae-in addressed the nation in a live televised broadcast.

The South Korean president called for Japan to reverse policy and for talks, also threatening to place restrictions on trade with Japan, and withdraw from an intelligence sharing agreement.

The administration of US President Donald Trump is reportedly seeking up to a fivefold increase in Japan’s spending on American military forces deployed to the Asian country.

In talks with Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono and Shotaro Yachi, the head of the National Security Council secretariat, last week US National Security Adviser John Bolton raised the possibility of the fivefold increase in Japan’s spending on US military, the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported on Wednesday, quoting a US government source.

Trump has long complained that Japan was not contributing enough to its defense and that the American military was shouldering an unfair burden. He has repeatedly criticized a decades-old military treaty with Japan as “unfair.”

Japan says it is not weighing sending military forces for a US-proposed maritime coalition in a purported mission of protecting maritime shipping lanes in the Middle East.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga said Tuesday that there was no change in the country’s stance previously stated by Defense Minister Takeshi Iwaya.

It was “as Minister Iwaya said,” noted the Japanese top government spokesman.

A man screaming “You die!” burst into an animation studio in Kyoto, doused it with a flammable liquid and set it on fire Thursday, killing 33 people in an attack that shocked the country and brought an outpouring of grief from anime fans.

Thirty-six others were injured, some of them critically, in a blaze that sent people scrambling up the stairs toward the roof in a desperate — and futile — attempt to escape what proved to be Japan’s deadliest fire in nearly two decades. Others emerged bleeding, blackened and barefoot.

The suspect, identified only a 41-year-old man who did not work for the studio, was injured and taken to a hospital. Police gave no details on the motive, but a witness told Japanese TV that the attacker angrily complained that something of his had been stolen, possibly by the company.

Was President Harry Truman “a murderer,” as the renowned British analytic philosopher Gertrude Elizabeth Anscombe once charged? Were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki indeed a war crime and a crime against humanity, as she and other academic luminaries have publicly claimed? A Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Ethics at Oxford and Cambridge, who was one of the 20th century’s most gifted philosophers and recognizably the greatest woman philosopher in history, Dr. Anscombe openly called President Truman a “war criminal” for his decision to have the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki leveled by atomic bombs in August 1945 (Rachels & Rachels 127). According to another academic critic, the late American historian Howard Zinn, at least 140,000 Japanese civilians were “turned into powder and ash” in Hiroshima.

The Japanese spacecraft Hayabusa2 made a carefully choreographed second touchdown on an asteroid called Ryugu last night (July 10) — and the photos are incredible.

The images beamed back to Earth show the perspective of two different cameras on board the spacecraft: the main navigation camera and a publicly funded camera pointed past the sampling mechanism.

Photos from the first camera show views of Ryugu's surface at touchdown; the second shows the nearby rock before and after the sampling itself.