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beijing – Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said Tuesday that the country has removed a buoy it installed within Japan’s exclusive economic zone around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. The Japanese-administered islands are claimed by China, where they are known as Diaoyu. The buoy in question has completed its task at the site, Guo said at a news conference, noting that relevant Chinese agencies have implemented voluntary and technical adjustment regarding the buoy according to the actual need of science and observation. The Japan Coast Guard said in a navigation warning on its website the same day that a Chinese buoy northeast of Taiwan has ceased to exist. The administration of Chinese President Xi Jinping has been working to improve his country’s relations with Japan, such as reaching an agreement toward the restart of fishery product imports from the neighboring country. The removal of the buoy may be part of China’s moves toward resolving issues between the two countries. In December 2024, however, a new Chinese buoy was found to have been installed within Japan’s EEZ south of Yonaguni Island in Okinawa. The Japanese side has been calling on China to remove it. Source link

Elon Musk told investors in late January that Tesla would roll out “autonomous ride-hailing for money” by June in Austin, Texas — a state where the company faces almost no regulation, raising questions about how much safety and legal risk Tesla is willing to take on as it deploys unproven driverless technology on public streets. Tesla has long blamed its customers for accidents involving the driver-assistance systems it calls Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD), noting that it warns Tesla owners to stay ready to take over driving. Now Musk is vowing to deploy truly driverless taxis, a move legal experts say would place crash liability squarely on Tesla. Musk has promised fully self-driving Teslas for about a decade and failed to deliver. The promises have grown more frequent, with more immediate timelines, in recent months as Musk has shifted Tesla’s focus toward autonomous vehicles and away from mass-market EV sales. Source link

At a regular convention in Tokyo on Tuesday, the opposition Democratic Party for the People adopted its fiscal 2025 policy platform highlighting its pledge to increase take-home pay. The convention came at a time when the party aims to boost morale further in the run-up to this summer’s House of Councilors poll, following its spectacular performance in last year’s general election. The fiscal 2025 platform stresses that increasing people’s take-home pay through measures including a revision of the minimum annual taxable income level from the current ¥1.03 million is the most important political challenge for the party. Source link

Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is poised to make plans for visiting China, after holding his first face-to-face meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump last week. Some in the Ishiba administration are eyeing a plan for the prime minister to visit China during Japan’s holiday period in early May at the earliest. Ishiba, who took office last October, hopes to hold his second meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in order to enhance momentum for improving Sino-Japanese relations. Source link

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of the world’s leading climate science agencies, has been ordered to identify grants related to global warming and other topics targeted by U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive orders, raising fears that those grants are at risk of being canceled. The instructions were issued Thursday at the direction of the Commerce Department, which includes the NOAA, according to a copy of the document viewed by The New York Times. NOAA staff members were given a list of all “active financial assistant awards” at NOAA and told to identify which of those grants could be “potentially impacted” by one of Trump’s orders. One of the directives in question, signed by Trump the day he took office, is aimed at demolishing federal government programs that address climate change. Based on that order, NOAA staff members have been told to search their existing grants for terms that include “climate science,” “climate crisis,” “clean energy,” “environmental quality” and “pollution.” The executive orders do not specifically mention NOAA. But Project 2025, the policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation that is reflected in many of the actions taken by the Trump administration, calls NOAA “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry.” The document urges that NOAA be dismantled and some of its programs terminated. And it calls for the privatization of the National Weather Service, a division of NOAA. Project 2025 was written by many people who now hold senior roles in the administration. In addition to research on atmospheric science, NOAA funds scientific work on the oceans, the Arctic, wildfires and more. The agency also operates satellites, provides weather data, predicts the path of hurricanes and regulates offshore fisheries. Florida’s sprawling landscape is seen from the cockpit windows as NOAA’s hurricane hunter team collects data from Tropical Storm Helene over the Gulf of Mexico on Sept. 24. | Zack Wittman / The New York Times The demand to identify climate-related grants follows the revelation last week that members of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, led by Elon Musk, had gained access to NOAA’s computer systems. Democrats sent a letter to Trump’s pick for commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, urging him to defend NOAA against Musk’s “unlawful attacks.” On Tuesday, environmentalists, lawmakers and other NOAA supporters are scheduled to hold a rally for the agency outside the Commerce Department. The goal “is to make sure that the American public knows that a critical agency that works for them is being attacked by President Trump and Elon Musk,” said Vincent Vertuccio, a 21-year-old senior at George Washington University who is one of the rally’s organizers. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat from Maryland, is set to speak at the rally. “Elon Musk’s reported targeting of the climate-related work at NOAA is another example of anti-science ideology run amok,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “It is also a payoff to the big oil companies and climate change deniers who are cheering on Trump and Musk.” The demand to identify climate-related grants inside NOAA was first reported by Axios. A spokesperson for NOAA did not respond to a request for comment. While previous administrations have made inquiries into NOAA’s climate grants and other data, the current search is far more comprehensive, looking into climate research, mitigation and adaptation. “I’m concerned that such a search would yield threats to important programs aimed at protecting communities from extreme weather and other climate-related disasters,” said Rick Spinrad, who led NOAA during the administration of Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden. “Last year we had almost 30 billion-dollar disasters from climate-related events. Are those going to be compromised? Is that the intent of the administration?” Andrew Rosenberg, another former senior official at NOAA, said the decision to scrutinize existing grants based on their compliance with Trump’s executive orders was inappropriate. A grant is a contract between NOAA and the group receiving that money, Rosenberg said. It can be canceled if the grant recipient isn’t meeting the terms of that contract, he added, or because the funding is no longer available. But canceling a grant because of changing political priorities is unfair to the grantees, he said. “Suppose I’m writing a proposal today for a NOAA grant,” Rosenberg said. “I’m supposed to anticipate today what the next five executive orders are going to say? How would I know?” NOAA’s climate grants go beyond scientific research. In American Samoa, Climate Ready Workforce, a $60 million NOAA grant program, has already spent roughly $100,000 through its fiscal sponsor, the University of Hawaii. So far, it has funded two staff positions and a trainer to provide the technical certification required for 25 employees of the island’s sole utility responsible for providing power, cleaning up trash and managing drinking water. The U.S. territory has had water problems because of rising sea levels and extreme weather fueled by climate change. It received a grant of nearly $1.8 million to train roughly 100 current and future utility employees on the island instead of requiring them to travel to the mainland. Kelley Anderson Tagarino, an American Samoa resident and a community adviser at the Hawaii Sea Grant program, said she was trying to keep moving forward at a moment of increasing anxiety. The program funds research at the School of Ocean and Earth Science and Technology at the University of Hawaii. “There’s been concern that there will be changes, but there’s been no directives so far, so we’re told to just keep going,” she said. “The message has mostly been, ‘This is a whole lot of chaos, stand by, we’re going to do our best to try and fulfill our mission of serving our communities.’” This article originally appeared in The New York Times © 2025 The New York Times Company Source link

Berlin – The decision by President Donald Trump to exclude transgender girls and women from female sports has triggered what is likely to be a long, complex clash with global sports authorities as the United States counts down to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. The order directs the Department of Justice to assure that U.S. government agencies — federal, state and local — enforce a ban on transgender girls and women from participating in female school sports under Trump’s interpretation of Title IX, a law against sex discrimination in education. Trump also said he would not allow transgender athletes to compete at the 2028 Olympics and urged the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to “change everything to do with the Olympics and this absolutely ridiculous subject.” His order may have earned praise among his supporters who say it will restore fairness in women’s sport, but there was no immediate outpouring of support from international organizations embroiled in the endlessly controversial battle for years. Instead, the order is likely to reignite a debate involving the IOC and various international sporting federations over the issue as it relates to elite sport, while exposing the huge variation in regulations. The IOC has staunchly refused to apply any universal rule for its Games. Instead, in 2021, it instructed international federations to each come up with their own rules for their sport. Some, including athletics, swimming and rugby, have done so, but many have yet to finalize any policy on the issue. The IOC responded to Trump’s order with a neutral-sounding statement: “Working with the respective international sports federations, the IOC will continue to explain and discuss the various topics with the relevant authorities,” an IOC spokesperson said. Many observers have been left exasperated by Trump’s order because it apparently conflates transgender competitors with athletes who have DSD, short for “differences of sexual development.” DSD athletes have a combination of genes, hormones and reproductive organs that can include genitals that are not always aligned with the norm of their sex. In the case of women, it means their bodies naturally produce more testosterone, giving them a measurable physical advantage in development and performance. Paris controversy The IOC, which currently allows transgender athletes to compete in the Olympics, was at the heart of the gender controversy at the 2024 Games involving two women boxers who both won gold medals. Trump made a reference to one of them, Algerian Imane Khelif, in his speech after signing the order, calling her “a male boxer.” “Who could forget last year’s Paris Olympics, where a male boxer stole the women’s gold medal after brutalizing his female opponent so viciously that she had to forfeit after 46 seconds, and she was a championship fighter,” Trump said. Khelif’s most controversial victory came against Italian Angela Carini, who gave up inside the first minute, saying she had never been hit so hard. Khelif, who had always competed as a woman, was banned by the sport’s federation from the 2023 world championships after a sex chromosome test that the International Boxing Association said rendered them ineligible. The IBA was later stripped of recognition over governance issues, leaving the IOC to run the sport in Paris. It then cleared Khelif to fight, saying she was born a woman and has competed in female competitions for years. Olympic participation The Olympic Games cleared transgender athletes to compete back in 2004, with New Zealand weightlifter Laurel Hubbard being the first to do so, at the delayed 2020 Tokyo Games. Since then, only a handful of transgender athletes have followed, but there is a long history of DSD athletes taking part, with South African middle-distance runner Caster Semenya having the highest profile. The former Olympic champion’s success led to a series of new rules that meant she and other DSD athletes could compete as women only after medically reducing their testosterone levels. Those restrictions have led to more than a decade of rulings and appeals though national and European courts, but DSD athletes remain largely banned from the sport of athletics. In theory Trump’s order should have minimal impact on the 2028 Games, which receive no federal funds and with the IOC steadfast in its determination to run their events without political interference. Trump, however, has shown little regard for the status quo in other areas and has already indicated that he would be prepared to interfere, not least by refusing entry visas. According to Trump’s order, the secretary of state and the Department of Homeland Security will be able to “review and adjust, as needed, policies permitting admission to the United States of males seeking to participate in women’s sports.” “If you are coming into the country and you are claiming that you are a woman, but you are a male here to compete against women, we’re going to be reviewing that for fraud,” an administration official told reporters. Such an approach is likely to cause friction with the IOC, and Trump’s order and its consequences are likely to be top of the agenda for the seven candidates seeking to replace Thomas Bach as IOC president in March. Some, such as World Athletics chief Sebastian Coe, want the IOC to lead the way in establishing a clear policy to “protect women’s sport” as he did with his federation, while others say they want more scientific evidence to back up any ruling. None of the candidates are proposing a ban on transgender athletes at the Olympics. Source link

THE HAGUE/KYIV – The Trump administration’s freeze of foreign funding has begun impacting an international effort to hold Russia responsible for alleged war crimes in Ukraine, according to eight sources and a Ukrainian document seen by Reuters, halting dozens of jobs and tens of millions of dollars in aid. Ukraine has opened more than 140,000 war crime cases since Moscow’s February 2022 invasion, which has killed tens of thousands, ravaged vast swaths of the country and left behind mental and physical scars from occupation. Russia consistently denies war crimes have been committed by its forces in the conflict. U.S.-funded international initiatives such as the Atrocity Crimes Advisory Group for Ukraine (ACA) have provided expertise and oversight to Ukrainian authorities. Kyiv has been praised by its Western partners for probing alleged crimes while the war is still raging. Source link

PARIS – Europe will cut back on regulation to make it easier for artificial intelligence to flourish in the region, French President Emmanuel Macron told an AI summit in Paris on Monday, urging investment in the EU — and more specifically in France. The European Union’s digital chief Henna Virkkunen also promised that the bloc will simplify its rules and implement them in a business-friendly way. As U.S. President Donald Trump has torn up his predecessor’s AI guardrails to boost U.S. competitiveness, pressure has built on the EU to pursue a lighter-touch approach to AI regulation to help keep European companies in the technology race. Source link

Osaka – Kobayashi Pharmaceutical said Monday that it suffered the first year-on-year decline in its group net profit since its 1999 stock listing in the business year ended December last year. The company’s net profit plunged 50.5% to ¥10.07 billion ($72 million) in the aftermath of a health scandal involving its supplements containing beni kōji red fermented rice, which emerged last year. Kobayashi Pharmaceutical booked a special loss of ¥12.7 billion mainly due to ballooning costs related to the recall of products containing beni kōji and compensation to victims affected by the scandal. Its sales of health food products, including supplements, were also sluggish. Source link

Japan’s digital trade deficit hit a record ¥6.65 trillion in 2024, more than tripling from 2014 when comparable data began, a government report shows. The data covered international trade in digital-related services, including payments of copyright fees for music and video distribution services and fees for cloud computing services, as well as online advertising fees. In digital trade, Japan’s imports have been rising faster than its exports, amid the dominance of global information technology giants such as Microsoft and Google. According to the Finance Ministry’s preliminary balance of payments report, released Monday, Japan enjoyed a record current account surplus of ¥29.26 trillion in 2024, thanks to higher dividend and interest receipts from abroad and a smaller trade deficit. Meanwhile, it logged a goods and services trade deficit of ¥6.51 trillion, weighed down by the digital trade balance, although its travel account surplus reached a record high, supported by an increase in visitors from overseas. According to an estimate released by the trade ministry in October last year, Japan’s digital trade deficit is expected to reach ¥10 trillion in 2030, roughly equivalent to its crude oil imports in 2024. Source link