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Ise, Mie Pref. – Former Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda, leader of the main opposition Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan, on Saturday rejected the idea of forming a grand coalition with the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. “We want to focus on uniting the power of opposition parties to change the government,” Noda told a news conference in Ise, Mie Prefecture. Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, who serves concurrently as LDP president, said in a radio program broadcast Wednesday that there “should be an option to form a grand coalition.” Noda, however, poured cold water on this suggestion Saturday. “A grand coalition is an option conceivable when there is a pandemic or a major crisis,” he said. “We don’t think about it in ordinary times.” Meanwhile, Seiji Maehara, co-leader of opposition Nippon Ishin no Kai (Japan Innovation Party), told a news conference also in Ise that his party was positioning itself as an outside force for an Upper House poll due this summer. “We’ll discuss with the ruling bloc to implement policies, but we’ll prepare for the House of Councillors election as an opposition party,” he said. Motohisa Furukawa, an executive with the opposition Democratic Party for the People, told a separate news conference in Ise that the DPFP has no intention of joining the LDP-led ruling camp. Source link

MOUNT ATHOS, Greece – The Ukrainian soldiers arrived in Greece with marks of war — one with a head scar, another with both legs amputated above the knee, some with invisible mental wounds from a three-year conflict that has ravaged their homeland. The men, 22 in all, had taken a bus more than 1,000 kilometers from the Ukrainian city of Lviv to a monastery built on a cliff on the mountainous Athos peninsula in northern Greece, where they hoped to escape haunting memories of the battlefield. In their four-day stay, part of a psychological support program organized by Ukrainian authorities, the soldiers made a pilgrimage to some dozen monasteries on the slopes of Mount Athos, a spiritual center since the 10th century. Source link

Tomiko Itooka, recognized by Britain’s Guinness World Records as the world’s oldest person in September last year, has died in western Japan, health ministry and other officials said Saturday. She was 116. Itooka died of old age at 9:03 p.m. Sunday in a nursing home for the elderly in the city of Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture, according to the ministry and city officials. Itooka, born in May 1908, had been the oldest person in Japan since a woman in the city of Kashiwara, Osaka Prefecture, a Hyogo neighbor, died at 116 in December 2023. Tomiko Itooka died of old age in a nursing home for the elderly in the city of Ashiya, Hyogo Prefecture. | Jiji Source link

U.S. President Joe Biden is set to order a ban on new offshore oil and gas development across some 625 million acres of U.S. coastal territory, ruling out the sale of drilling rights in Atlantic and Pacific waters as well as the eastern Gulf of Mexico. The move represents a sweeping effort to permanently protect coastal waters — and communities that depend on them — from fossil fuel development and the risk of oil spills. At the same time, Biden is keeping the door open for new oil and natural gas leasing in the central and western portions of the Gulf of Mexico that have been drilled for decades and currently provide about 14% of the country’s production of those fuels, said people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the decision is not yet public. Biden’s decision, set to be announced on Monday, will further burnish his climate credentials, deepening his record of fostering conservation and zero-emission energy. It builds on a series of last-minute White House moves to safeguard lands and enshrine environmental protections before President-elect Donald Trump takes office. Source link

The Islamic State group has lost thousands of fighters to death or prison and suffered the demise of its self-declared caliphate in Iraq and Syria. But the global reach of the group, also known as ISIS, is still vast, in part because of its sophisticated media output and the people around the world who consume it. On New Year’s Day, a man with an Islamic State group flag killed at least 14 people when he drove into a crowd in New Orleans. Authorities say there was no evidence that the man, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, had active connections to the terrorist group. But the FBI said “he was 100% inspired by ISIS.” It is not yet clear which specific online content Jabbar may have seen or how else he may have been radicalized. Experts noted that the placement of the flag on the truck resembled one depicted by the Islamic State group in a media campaign urging followers to “run them over without mercy.” And, authorities said, he posted several videos to his Facebook account before his attack in which he pledged allegiance to Islamic State group. Source link

Japan’s Meiji Yasuda Life Insurance wants to seek more acquisitions overseas, where it’s prepared to spend to buy attractive assets. “There is no such thing as ‘too expensive’ when it comes to hundreds of billions of yen,” President Hideki Nagashima said in an interview, referring to the acquisition price. “Depending on the other party, we may have to be a little more daring.” He is particularly keen on the U.S., where its subsidiary StanCorp Financial Group said this year it’s buying Allstate’s benefits unit for about $2 billion. The firm’s ambitions reflect bold moves also being made by many of its local rivals, all hunting for growth outside of the country given Japan’s shrinking population. The country’s insurers have announced about $44 billion of acquisitions and investment deals over the last five years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Source link

For months, United States Steel argued that selling out to Japanese-owned Nippon Steel was the only way to survive. President Joe Biden thought different, concluding that even a takeover by a company based in close ally Japan wasn’t enough to allay national-security concerns. Such is the new politics of global trade and investment. In blocking the deal Friday, Biden pointed to what he said was “credible evidence” that Nippon Steel’s $14.1 billion bid would “create risk for our national security and our critical supply chains.” He didn’t say what the evidence was, though he invoked the Defense Production Act, which gives the president power over the economy to ensure the supply of critical goods. Source link

WASHINGTON – U.S. cities are grappling with a quickly changing landscape in how to respond to a worsening homelessness crisis, following a ground-breaking Supreme Court decision in June and ahead of Donald Trump’s return to the White House in January. Proponents of more punitive options are feeling emboldened, as cities from Phoenix in Arizona to Fort Lauderdale in Florida step up enforcement even as others such as Philadelphia and Providence, Rhode Island, eye new protections. Known as the Grants Pass decision, the June Supreme Court ruling gives local officials new powers to criminalize sleeping in public, even if adequate shelter space is not available. Source link

Seoul – U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit South Korea for talks next week, the two countries announced Friday, with Seoul mired in political turmoil as its impeached president resists arrest. Blinken, on what will likely be his last international trip before President-elect Donald Trump’s return, will also visit Japan and France, the State Department said. South Korea is a key security ally for Washington, but the country has been wracked by a crisis sparked by President Yoon Suk Yeol’s failed martial law decree on Dec. 3. Source link

The European Union has stepped up efforts to build ties with Syria’s new leaders and persuade them to reduce Russia’s influence over the war-ravaged country with a visit by the German and French foreign ministers to Damascus. Germany’s Annalena Baerbock and her French counterpart, Jean-Noël Barrot, held talks with Syria’s de-facto leader, Ahmed al-Sharaa, on Friday. They’re the highest-ranking Western officials to go to Syria since al-Sharaa’s Islamist group, Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham, ousted Syrian President Bashar Assad last month. Baerbock said in a statement before departing Berlin that the EU wants to help Syria achieve “an inclusive, peaceful transfer of power” as well as with reconstruction efforts, and acknowledged it will be “a rocky road.” Source link