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Tokyo District Court on Wednesday sentenced a Chinese man to eight months in prison for vandalizing the war-related Yasukuni Shrine. According to the ruling, Jiang Zhuojun, 29, conspired with two other Chinese men to write “toilet” in red spray paint on a pillar at the shrine on May 31. Handing down the ruling, judge Yasushi Fuke said that Jiang actively played an essential role in the case, such as previewing the site and preparing the spray paint, although his responsibility was lighter than the other two, who are on the wanted list. Referring to his claim that he intended to protest the release into the sea of tritium-containing treated water from the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, the judge said, “It cannot be considered an extenuating factor.” Source link

Astana, Kazakhstan – An Azerbaijan Airlines passenger jet with 67 people on board crashed on Wednesday in western Kazakhstan after veering from its scheduled route, officials said. Azerbaijani authorities said 32 people had survived the crash of the Embraer 190 near the city of Aktau, an oil and gas hub on the eastern shore of the Caspian Sea. The plane was flying from the Azerbaijani capital Baku on the western shore of the Caspian to the city of Grozny in Chechnya in southern Russia. Source link

Seoul – A factory turned into a battlefield, riot police armed with tasers and an activist who spent 100 days atop a chimney — the unrest that inspired Netflix’s most successful show ever has all the hallmarks of a TV drama. This month sees the release of the second season of “Squid Game,” a dystopian vision of South Korea where desperate people compete in deadly versions of traditional children’s games for a massive cash prize. But while the show, itself, is a work of fiction, Hwang Dong-hyuk, its director and writer, has said the experiences of the main character Gi-hun, a laid-off worker, were inspired by the violent Ssangyong strikes in 2009. Source link

Education minister Toshiko Abe on Wednesday asked a government panel to consider ways to give schools more discretion to determine class hours and content as part of a planned overall revision of the country’s school curriculum guidelines. The minister also asked the Central Council for Education to come up with measures to improve the media literacy of schoolchildren. The council, which advises the education minister, will discuss the issues with the aim of presenting a set of curriculum revision proposals by the end of 2026. Source link

Russia and China are teaming up to collaborate in the information space and push their worldview onto global audiences. It is well-known that Russian and Chinese troll farms are active all over social media. Moscow in particular has long been the world’s leading propaganda expert, as evidenced by its deployment of “active measures” during the Cold War all the way to the current practice of flooding social media with inauthentic accounts and comments. In many parts of the world, Russia’s influence operations have been so successful as to convince audiences that its war on Ukraine is justified, or at least make them sympathetic to the Kremlin’s point of view. Source link

Washington – U.S. mayors and others have sent a letter to U.S. President Joe Biden seeking his approval of Nippon Steel’s plan to acquire United States Steel, it was learned Tuesday. “We are writing to express our strong support for the acquisition of U.S. Steel” by the major Japanese steelmaker, said the joint letter from a total of 20 people including the heads of administrative districts in Pennsylvania and Indiana where U.S. Steel has production and other facilities. These local communities “overwhelmingly support the vision and commitments that Nippon Steel has introduced to ensure that their jobs are protected and that their local facilities stay open,” it also said. Source link

London – Every Christmas, Brits devour about 800 million mince pies, but moves to jazz up the festive sweet treats made of dried fruit and pastry are stirring anger among purists. It is the source of some puzzlement to the outside world that British mince pies have not in fact been filled with minced meat for centuries. Instead, the mincemeat encased in an individual shortcrust pastry pie is a mixture of different dried fruits, chopped apples and spices soaked in spirits such as brandy and rum. Source link

New York – Japan will remain the third-largest contributor to the United Nations’ regular budget for 2025-27, according to a resolution adopted by the U.N. General Assembly on Tuesday. The share of Japan’s contribution to the regular budget will drop by about 1 percentage point from the current level to 6.930%. China’s contribution will rise by 4.75 points to 20.004%, exceeding 20% for the first time ever, reflecting its economic growth. The share of the United States will remain unchanged at the upper limit of 22%. As a result, there will be no change in the top three contributors to the U.N. budget in the order of the U.S., China and Japan. The share is calculated based on gross national income and other factors and revised every three years. Japan overtook the former Soviet Union in 1986 to take second place. Japan’s share hit a peak of 20.573% in 2000 before starting to decline. China overtook it in the 2018 revision to fall to third place. Source link

Andaman Sea, Thailand – Almost 1,000 kilometers off the Thai coast devastated by a tsunami 20 years ago, engineers lower a detection buoy into the waves — a key link in a warning system intended to ensure no disaster is as deadly again. On Dec. 26, 2004, a magnitude 9.1 earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered a huge tsunami with waves up to 30 meters high. Only a rudimentary warning system was in place at the time, with no way to alert the millions of people living around the Indian Ocean in advance. More than 225,000 people were killed in a dozen countries. Source link

Shizuoka Prefecture has recorded the longest estimated average healthy life expectancy for both men and women as of 2022, at 73.75 and 76.68 years respectively, the health ministry said Tuesday. Iwate Prefecture ranked bottom among the nation’s 47 prefectures for both men and women, at 70.93 and 74.28 years. Every three years the ministry estimates healthy life expectancy, which represents the span of a normal life without health problems, based on a comprehensive survey of living conditions. The first estimate was based on a survey for 2010, and the latest is the fifth edition. The nationwide average for men decreased 0.11 year from the previous survey, for 2019, to 72.57 years, while that for women went up 0.07 year, to 75.45 years. The nationwide average life expectancy was 81.05 years for men and 87.09 years for women. The gap between the life and healthy life expectancies shortened by 0.24 year to 8.49 years for men and by 0.43 year to 11.63 years for women from the previous estimate in 2019. The gap continued to shrink from the first estimate. Ranked by the estimated average healthy life expectancy by prefecture for men, Ishikawa Prefecture came second, at 73.60 years, and Yamanashi Prefecture was third, at 73.47 years. For women, Yamaguchi Prefecture ranked second, at 76.43 years, and Gifu Prefecture was third, at 76.20 years. The gap between the top and bottom prefectures in the estimated average healthy life expectancy for men grew to 2.82 years from 2.79 years in the first estimate, while that for women shrank to 2.40 years from 2.95 years. Source link