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Sydney – Naoya Inoue’s Christmas Eve super-bantamweight world title fight against Sam Goodman in Tokyo has been postponed to Jan. 24, his gym announced Saturday after the Australian cut his eye in sparring. “We were informed today from Goodman’s side that he had sustained an injury,” Inoue’s Ohashi Gym said in a statement. “We decided to postpone the fight after discussing with Goodman’s side the status of his recovery,” it said, adding the fight would now take place on Jan. 24. Goodman hurt his left eye during his final training session before jetting to Japan to face the undisputed champion, the Australian’s promoter and his manager told Sydney’s Daily Telegraph. Goodman, the mandatory challenger for Inoue’s WBO and IBF titles, needed four stitches and was told he could not fight for four weeks, the newspaper said. “He’s still going to be great, but we couldn’t let him fight with the cut in 10 days’ time,” his manager Pete Mitrevski said. Inoue, who has a 28-0 record with 25 knockouts, beat Ireland’s TJ Doheny in his most recent defense in Tokyo in September. The fight against Goodman, who has a 19-0 record with eight KOs, was set to be his last in his homeland before an expected bout in Las Vegas next year. Inoue was due to defend his super-bantamweight titles for the third time since becoming undisputed champion in December last year. He is just the second man to become undisputed world champion at two different weights since the four-belt era began in 2004. American Terence Crawford was the first. Source link

If you’re just getting up to speed on chatbots and copilots, you’re already falling behind. Talk in Silicon Valley now is squarely focused on “agents” — artificial intelligence that can handle multistep chores like onboarding clients, approving expenses and not just routing but actually responding to customer-service requests, all with minimal human supervision. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman calls agents “the next giant breakthrough.” Salesforce has already signed deals to install AI agents at more than 200 companies including Accenture, Adecco Group, FedEx, International Business Machines, and RBC Wealth Management. “We’re really at the edge of a revolutionary transformation,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said on the software company’s most recent earnings call. “This is really the rise of digital labor.” Source link

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol’s fate was hanging in the balance Saturday, ahead of a second impeachment vote over his failed bid to declare martial law — a measure that, if passed, could have wide-ranging implications for the Asian democracy and bilateral as well as trilateral ties with Japan and the U.S. Lawmakers from the country’s National Assembly are set to vote around 4 p.m. over whether to remove the president for committing “insurrectionary acts” and “abandoning the duty to protect the constitution.” The impeachment vote will be the second attempt after an earlier one failed a week ago. The measure needs 200 votes to pass, meaning the main opposition Democratic Party (DP) and its partners must convince eight lawmakers from Yoon’s People Power Party (PPP) to defy their colleague. Seven PPP lawmakers have already pledged to back the president’s impeachment, with some observers saying that Yoon was unlikely to survive the vote. Source link

Seoul – South Korea’s Yoon Suk Yeol rose from public prosecutor to the nation’s highest office in just a few years, but as president he staggered from scandal to scandal before plunging the country into crisis by declaring martial law. The lurch back to South Korea’s dark days of military rule only lasted a few hours, and after a night of protests and high drama last week Yoon was forced into a U-turn. But polls show a huge majority of citizens want him out and lawmakers vote Saturday on a second impeachment motion brought by the opposition, who control parliament but need eight parliamentarians from Yoon’s party to switch sides to pass the measure. Source link

Nippon Steel had high hopes for the $14.1 billion takeover of U.S. Steel. But with the deal now likely to unravel, the biggest Japanese steelmaker will be forced to consider next steps for rapid growth. The bid for the once-fabled American company ran into a maelstrom of political opposition in the U.S. in the run-up to the presidential election. U.S. President Joe Biden is planning to formally block the acquisition before the end of the month, Bloomberg reported this week. That’s left Nippon Steel, which aimed to boost crude steel production capacity by 30% with the U.S. Steel deal, in the lurch. The takeover, which would have made it the world’s No. 3 steelmaker, was aimed at reducing its dependence on the waning Japanese market and helping it compete with the big mills in China, whose excessive output and surging exports has sparked a trade backlash around the world. Source link

People with missing teeth may be able to grow new ones, say Japanese dentists testing a pioneering drug they hope will offer an alternative to dentures and implants. Unlike reptiles and fish, which usually replace their fangs on a regular basis, it is widely accepted that humans and most other mammals only grow two sets of teeth. But hidden underneath our gums are the dormant buds of a third generation, according to Katsu Takahashi, head of oral surgery at the Medical Research Institute Kitano Hospital in Osaka. Source link

A superstar Scott Boras client, just 25 years old at the end of the regular season, was the most coveted free agent in baseball. That December, at the winter meetings in Dallas, he signed a record contract that rattled the industry. The player had just led his team to a deep postseason run that ended in defeat at Yankee Stadium. His departure clouded their immediate future. All of that applied to Alex Rodriguez and the Seattle Mariners in 2000. A generation later, it’s the same story, word for word, with Juan Soto and the New York Yankees. Back then, the Texas Rangers gave 10 years and $252 million to Rodriguez, who had 189 career homers and a .934 on-base plus slugging percentage. This time, the New York Mets gave 15 years and $765 million to Soto, who has 201 home runs and a .953 OPS. Mets owner Steve Cohen will unveil his prize at a Citi Field news conference Thursday. Source link

Fukuoka – Kyushu Railway, or JR Kyushu, is considering withdrawing from a ship route between Japan and South Korea over a scandal in which a subsidiary covered up a water leak incident on a high-speed passenger ship, it was learned Friday. In August this year, JR Kyushu said that the subsidiary, JR Kyushu Jet Ferry, had been covering up water ingress while operating the Queen Beetle high-speed passenger ship linking the city of Fukuoka and the South Korean city of Busan for more than three months. The JR Kyushu group has been working on raising safety awareness among employees, repairing the ship and enhancing governance, with the aim of resuming the passenger ship operations. Since the ship is made of aluminum, however, repairs by welding are difficult. “While we are aiming to resume operations, we are also considering withdrawal from the business as an option,” JR Kyushu President Yoji Furumiya told reporters. Source link

The Naha District Court on Friday sentenced a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force serviceman to five years in prison for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a girl under the age of 16 in Okinawa Prefecture late last year. Brennon Washington was stationed at Kadena Air Base when he abducted the minor on Dec. 24, 2023. Prosecutors said Washington approached the girl as she sat on a park bench in central Okinawa, initiating a conversation using a translation app and asking her for her age. The girl reportedly responded switching between Japanese and English, using gestures to signal her age, which was captured on security footage. Source link

The Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, Komeito, have agreed to postpone a decision on when to raise income tax rates to secure funding for higher defense expenditures, Yoichi Miyazawa, chair of the LDP’s tax panel, said Friday. As for defense spending-linked hikes of corporate and tobacco taxes, the ruling parties are set to include a plan to start implementing them in April 2026 in their outline for the fiscal 2025 tax system reform. The two parties’ tax system research commissions initially aimed to raise corporate and tobacco taxes in April 2026 and income tax rates in January 2027, and had hoped to include both measures in the tax system reform package for fiscal 2025. Source link