Japan Times: News & Business

IWAKI, Fukushima Pref. (Kyodo) Police on Monday released a 70-year-old woman they arrested over the weekend on suspicion of fraud after finding skeletal remains believed to be of her mother at their home in Iwaki, Fukushima Prefecture, saying it is unlikely she will flee.
Aiko Watanabe, the fifth daughter of Michi Watanabe, who is registered as being 102 years old, turned herself in and was arrested Saturday for allegedly defrauding the city in September 2007 of ¥300,000 in special benefits payable to her mother if she were alive.

HARKLOWA, Poland (Kyodo) Climbers from Kyoto University who scaled Afghanistan's highest mountain more than half a century ago reunited Sunday with their Polish rivals for the first time since vying to become the first party to conquer the peak.
The reunion took place in the southern Polish village of Harklowa to commemorate both parties' success in reaching the summit of 7,492-meter Mount Nowshak in August 1960 and rekindled the friendship they showed along the way.

Japan is known as the biggest consumer of tuna. Be it raw for sushi or sashimi or fried, broiled or canned, tuna is an important element of the food culture.
But concerns are growing because tuna is disappearing, and this is putting Japan in a difficult diplomatic position.

Under growing pressure to act, the Bank of Japan announced Monday it will ease its monetary stance further by expanding a ¥20 trillion lending program to ¥30 trillion, aiming to lower short-term interest rates and curb the yen's rise against the dollar.
The decision came ahead of the government's release of its economic stimulus package later in the day. Prime Minister Naoto Kan has urged the central bank to take further steps to shore up the economy, which could be hurt by the recent surges in the yen and declines in the stock market.

NAGOYA (Kyodo) A Toyota Motor Corp. employee was arrested on suspicion of shoplifting two packs of chewing gum at a supermarket and injuring a security guard in Okazaki, Aichi Prefecture, police said.
The police quoted Shigeru Saito, 57, an engineer, as saying, "I didn't do it."

Sunshine International Aquarium, located atop the Sunshine City building in Tokyo's Ikebukuro district, will close for a year beginning Wednesday for large-scale renovations to compete better with other aquariums in the Kanto region.
When it opened in 1978, the aquarium was touted as the first in Japan to be build on top of a high-rise. In recent years, the aquarium has suffered a decline in visitors as rival venues opened.

SAPPORO (Kyodo) A truck driver was killed Monday and seven people were injured when his vehicle collided with a large sightseeing bus inside a tunnel in Otaru, Hokkaido, according to the police.
The accident occurred at around 8:15 a.m. in the Asari-toge Tunnel, some 8 km south of the Asari Interchange. The seven injured included five people who were in the bus and two who were in the truck.

The number of Western movies subtitled in Japanese is rapidly declining as 3-D movies become more common and viewers grow more averse to reading text on screen.
Instead, many theaters are opting to show films dubbed in Japanese.

MUNICH — The world's worst postwar financial crisis is over. It arrived suddenly in 2008 and, after roughly 18 months, vanished almost as quickly as it had come. Bank rescue programs on the order of 5 trillion euro and Keynesian stimulus programs on the order of a further 1 trillion euro staved off collapse.
After falling 0.6 percent in 2009, world GDP is expected to grow this year by 4.6 percent and by 4.3 percent in 2011, according to International Monetary Fund forecasts — faster than average growth over the last three decades.

There is little for Australian politicians to be proud of as they contemplate the results of last month's parliamentary elections. The vote was almost perfectly divided, resulting in the first hung Parliament since 1940. At this point, the two major parties are courting the four independents to see who can muster a majority. Yet even if a government is formed, it is likely to be unstable. Another election is likely to have to be held, yet even that may not resolve the deadlock. Prepare for muddle.
Australia went to the polls late last month after Prime Minister Julia Gillard called early elections in an attempt to seize the moment as her party enjoyed a brief surge in popularity. That was a mistake. Ms. Gillard had taken the prime minister's office after a backroom coup deposed her predecessor, Mr. Kevin Rudd. Mr. Rudd led Labor to power in November 2007 after 11 years in the opposition. He started off strong, but shifts on key policies — climate change and taxation on mineral exporters — pushed his popularity to dangerously low levels. Alarmed, party officials engineered his dismissal and replaced him with Ms. Gillard. While she enjoyed a brief honeymoon with voters, the backroom bloodletting proved more than most Australians could stomach. By the time they went to the polls, Labor's government looked short lived.

NEW YORK — The Roma, persecuted for centuries, now face a form of discrimination unseen in Europe since World War II: group evictions and expulsions from several European democracies of men, women and children on the grounds that they pose a threat to public order.
Last week, France began to carry out plans to expel all non-French Roma, implicating them as a group in criminal activity, without any legal process to determine whether individuals have committed any crime or pose a threat to public order. These French actions follow Italy's "security package" of 2008, which described "nomads" as a threat to national security and imposed emergency legislation leading to expulsions of non-Italian Roma.

The Japan Sumo Association will use "mob cams" during the Autumn Grand Sumo Tournament at Ryogoku Kokugikan stadium in Tokyo in an attempt to throw organized crime out of the traditional sport.
Determined to remove yakuza from the sport once and for all under new Chairman Hanaregoma, the JSA said Sunday that it will install security cameras at the Kokugikan for the September meet, or "basho," in consultation with the police.

LONDON — When Japanese Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada was in Delhi a few days back for the fourth round of strategic dialogue between Japan and India, he made it clear that negotiations on a civilian nuclear cooperation pact are going to be rather difficult.
There are indications that these negotiations have stalled. It now looks unlikely that this pact will be signed during Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's visit to Japan in October as originally planned.

The Middle East has long been a graveyard for the diplomatic ambitions of U.S. presidents. There has been some progress in normalizing relations between Israel and its neighbors, but a real settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict and the realization of genuine peace between Israel and its neighbors remain stubbornly out of reach. The week before last, U.S. President President Barack Obama launched his own initiative, inviting Israel and the Palestinians to try once again to build an enduring peace. While he is right to try, there is little reason to believe he will succeed where his predecessors did not.
Mr. Obama promised during the 2008 presidential campaign that he would tackle the problem early in his presidency. His readiness to engage was another way in which he contrasted himself with his predecessor, Mr. George W. Bush, who had preferred to keep his distance from the Middle East.

Residents of neighboring resort towns in Shizuoka Prefecture are waging a battle against a marauding monkey that has bitten dozens of people in the past few weeks — and the monkey is winning.
Nearly 60 people in the towns of Mishima and Susono near the scenic Izu Peninsula and Mount Fuji have been chomped by the macaque since mid-August, mostly on the calves. Mishima now publishes a daily "biting monkey" alert on the town Web site, posting where the animal was most recently spotted and warning residents to keep doors and windows shut.

NAGOYA (Kyodo) A mentally handicapped teenager was arrested Saturday on suspicion of fatally stabbing his 11-year-old brother with scissors and a knife at their home in Iwakura, Aichi Prefecture, local police said.
The suspect, 17, initially admitted to the allegation, saying he stabbed his younger brother after a fight, but later said he didn't remember the incident, the police said.

Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshito Sengoku said Sunday that he saw no problem with political entities he controls giving money to a company run by his eldest son, because the funds were paid as fees for handling some of the entities' activities.
Sengoku, the top government spokesman and Prime Minister Naoto Kan's right-hand man, told reporters the three political bodies paid a total of ¥3.2 million, or ¥100,000 per month, to his son's real estate management company for two years and eight months until last December.

Since May, a number of factories in China have been hit by strikes and other forms of labor disputes, and an end seems to be nowhere in sight. Most of the plants targeted by the strikers are subsidiaries of overseas corporations. Especially hard hit have been the subsidiaries of Japanese companies, including two automakers — Toyota and Honda.
Law enforcement authorities are no longer suppressing the strikers as they did in the past at the request of management. Instead, they are taking a wait-and-see attitude, apparently because the general public overwhelmingly supports the workers' demands for pay hikes and because the central government appears to have given tacit approval of the strikes.

The Japanese and U.S. governments have ironed out their report on construction options for replacing a contentious U.S. Marine Corps air base in Okinawa Prefecture, according to sources familiar with the matter.
The report mentions two options for building the facility that will replace Futenma air station: two runways in a V-shaped formation, a plan favored by the United States, and a single runway, the option favored by Japan.

MIYAZAKI (Kyodo) Livestock auctions resumed Sunday in Miyazaki Prefecture as farmers hoped to give the vital industry a fresh start following a four-month foot-and-mouth disease epidemic that finally came to an end two days ago.
Among the eight sales rings in the prefecture, one in Takachiho, a town on Miyazaki's border with Kumamoto Prefecture, was the earliest to reopen. Local farmers plan to auction off some 970 calves during the two-day event through Monday. The other rings are slated to follow by the end of September.