The government said Friday that the Public Security Intelligence Agency inspected 32 facilities belonging to the Aum Shinrikyo cult last year in accordance to a law designed to curb the cult’s activities. The Aum Shinrikyo (Religion of Truth) cult is responsible for the the 1995 sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system, which […]
Palagummi Sainath a renowned journalist and rural affairs editor of The Hindu delivered the First Maharaj Kaul Memorial Lecture at University of Berkeley, California on April 11. Sainath has written extensively on farmer suicide and paid news, issues that have not been widely reported in the mainstream Indian media. At Berkeley, Sainath choose to speak […]
In the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake and tsunami that left 13,392 dead and 15,133 missing (most of whom are assumed to have been washed out to sea), and the subsequent nuclear crisis at Fukushima, the Japanese are making a long-overdue assessment of their society. Chief Cabinet Secretary Yukio Edano said Wednesday that former […]
The following is the U.S. State Department’s assessment of Bangladesh’s human rights record over the course of the last year. Without pulling any punches, at lenght: “Security forces committed extrajudicial killings and were responsible for custodial deaths, torture, and arbitrary arrest and detention. The failure to investigate fully extrajudicial killings by security forces, including several […]
It is abundantly clear that the Pakistani military intends to use the recent Raymond Davis affair as a bargaining chip that it hopes will keep rolling back to the negotiating table. Raymond Davis, a 36 year old man revealed to be a CIA contractor fatally shot two Pakistani men on the streets of Lahore earlier […]
Japan ranked the severity of the Fukushima nuclear crisis a level 7, the highest possibly rank on an international scale, putting the situation at Fukushima on the same level as Chernobyl. But as FPA blogger Jeff Myher pointed out in his Energy blog, there is a quantitative difference between the ongoing crisis at Fukushima and […]
A new study by The Economic Strategy Institute (ESI), commissioned by the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, called “The Evolving Role of China in International Institutions”, takes a thorough look into China’s growing influence in international organizations. The report contains two truisms, ten trends, seven recommendations, and a number of case studies on China’s […]
U.N. Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction Margareta Wahlstrom had nothing but praise for Japan’s preparedness for natural disasters, which apparently includes drills, building codes and risk assessment. Wahlstrom said Monday strong building codes, constant drills among the population and an effective warning system saved lives when the massive earthquake and tsunami hit Japan on […]
Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara was voted in for a fourth term in Sunday’s election. Voter turnout was 57.8 percent, and Ishihara got about 43 percent of the vote. The 78-year-old, far-right incumbent, who has been an independent governor of Tokyo since 1999, played up his role in handling the aftermath of the March 11 earthquake […]
Something I ran across on the ‘net that I wanted to share with readers. The video below was originally posted by Aljazeera in September of 2010: The past decade has seen Chinese economic growth explode across the world and the Chinese economic miracle seems to reach into every imaginable area of manufacturing and natural resources. […]
The brokerage arm of Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group, SMBC Nikko Securities Inc, says an employee at a Tokyo branch swindled 16 individual investors out of a total of about 880 million yen (more than $10 million) over an 11-year period to earlier this year. The employee, who was in charge of sales for individual investors, […]
Many foreign nationals fleeing Japan are basing their decisions on pressure from family back home and the overly bleak scenarios projected by foreign media. State Foreign Secretary Chiaki Takahashi told a press conference Thursday that foreign coverage of the nuclear crisis in Fukushima has been sensationalist and in some cases incorrect. Takahashi asked foreign media […]
A 7.4-magnitude earthquake struck near Miyagi at 11:32 p.m. Thursday. The quake was the strongest aftershock of the 9.0-magnitude quake that hit the same region Mar. 11. Two people have died and 132 were injured as a result of the quake. One 79-year-old man died of shock and a woman in her 60s died when […]
It is important to keep Gandhi untarnished. The Gandhian can be negotiated with. Two developments in India during the past week convinced me of the above approach in Indian politics. American journalist Joseph Lelyveld’s book The Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India created furore in the country. The book has been banned […]
The Japanese government defended Tokyo Electric Power Co.’s dumping of radioactive water into the ocean by claiming the action violates no international laws Tuesday. The government claims TEPCO’s dumping of 11,500 tons of low-level tainted water does not violate the 1986 Convention on Early Notification of a Nuclear Accident or the U.N. Convention on the […]
