A little Island

モーガンフリーマンが！？ ショックだよーと言っていた。

1)   US President Donald Trump says it’s still possible that a summit between him and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un can go ahead on June 12th as originally planned.

2)   Oscar-winning actor Morgan Freeman is facing multiple allegations of sexual harassment. The 80-year-old movie veteran has apologized to anyone who felt uncomfortable or disrespected.

CNN reported on Thursday that 8 women said they had been subjected to inappropriate behavior or harassment by Freeman.

3)   A US district court has ruled that President Donald Trump cannot block Twitter users from his account because of their political views. Trump has been blocking tweets that criticize him.

On Wednesday, a judge in New York described the president’s Twitter account as a public forum, and said blocking Twitter users for their views violated their right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution. The judge ordered Trump to unblock his account.

4)   The US State Department says an employee stationed in southern China has been diagnosed with a brain injury after hearing strange sounds.

The worker at the US Consulate General in Guangzhou reported abnormal sensations of sound and pressure from last year until April. The employee returned to the US for tests, and was found to have brain trauma.

More than 20 employees at the US Embassy in Havana became ill last year after what the media described as a “sonic attack.”

5)   The former head of an Osaka-based school operator, the central figure in an alleged favoritism scandal, has been released on bail. He says his detention was politically motivated.

Yasunori Kagoike, who ran Moritomo Gakuen, and his wife, Junko, were arrested by prosecutors late last July. They allegedly defrauded the government out of money in connection with the construction of a planned elementary school.

6)   The former head coach of Nihon University’s American football team has been caught on tape praising a player who injured an opponent in a match earlier this month.

In the audio clip recorded just after the game on May 6th, Uchida was questioned by reporters about the player being sent off for a series of fouls. He replied that it was inevitable because he was the head coach, and said the team had always been that way.

7)   Police in Kumamoto Prefecture, southwestern Japan, say at least 10 components believed to have fallen from an airplane have been found around a local airport.

A Japan Airlines Boeing 767 carrying 217 people returned to Kumamoto Airport on Thursday afternoon due to engine trouble. The plane was bound for Tokyo’s Haneda Airport.

8)   Japanese Olympic swimmer Junya Koga has tested positive for substances banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency.

Koga said the banned substances may have been in nutritional supplements he began taking in February of this year.

He claimed he did not take the banned substances intentionally, and said he is ashamed to have tested positive.

9)   US civil rights groups are asking Amazon.com to stop offering its facial recognition services to police and other government agencies.

The services have been used in police investigations, checking IDs at building entrances and searching for lost children at amusement parks.

The group also warned that the services could unfairly target minorities and immigrants in particular.

10)   A self-driving vehicle is being tested on public roads near Tokyo in an initiative led by a Japanese retail giant.

Aeon hopes the technology will make it easier for customers who don’t own cars to get to its supermarkets.

11)   A Japanese government-backed fund and a major Japanese trading house have jointly invested in a venture firm that makes food from algae.

The venture produces spirulina, an algae rich in vitamins. Demand for the so-called superfood has been growing, as it’s a popular addition to fruit juices.

12)   Chinese authorities detained 21 Japanese nationals in the southwestern city of Chongqing and elsewhere this month, a source close to Japanese-Chinese relations said Friday.

The Japanese are said to have been Christian group members and their detention may have been part of the authorities’ efforts to crack down on missionary work, categorizing it as illegal activity.

N大アメフトのQBへの攻撃についてが多かったかな、アメリカ人はアメフトの話が大好きなんだね。^^

1)   Nearly all respondents to an internet survey of media workers, prompted by news of a TV reporter being sexually harassed by a top Finance Ministry bureaucrat, say they experienced sexual harassment multiple times.

A total of 103 women and four men responded to the questionnaire, and 102 of the women reported having been sexually haarassed, of whom 51 said they had experienced it 10 or more times and 47 said between two to nine times.

2)   At least 100 bamboo trees in Kyoto’s Arashiyama district have been vandalized by tourists, who apparently engraved their names and initials, a company managing the iconic groves of the popular tourist spot said Thursday.

The engravings carved on tree surfaces are in foreign language letters, including alphabets and Hangul characters.

3)   The Diet on Wednesday passed a law to encourage female candidates to stand for elections in a country where women are vastly underrepresented in politics.

Under the new law, political parties are urged to make the number of male and female candidates as equal as possible and are encouraged to set targets for gender parity.

But the law includes no penalties for parties that fail to do so, nor incentives to encourage them.

4)   To thwart groping and other crimes, train cars equipped with security cameras will run on the Yamanote Line in central Tokyo for the first time on May 19, East Japan Railway Co. (JR East) said.

JR East said it plans to replace all current trains on the line with new “E235 series” trains by spring 2020, a few months before the Tokyo Summer Olympics.

The railway company also intends to install security cameras inside all new trains on other lines from this fiscal year, which started in April.

5)   A vicious and extremely late hit against a defenseless quarterback in an American football game has led to a suspension, boycotted games and a government demand for an investigation.

The Nihon University football player under fire for a vicious cheap shot said his coach ordered him to “break” the quarterback or be benched, a teammate told The Asahi Shimbun on May 17.

6)   Japanese teenage shogi chess sensation Sota Fujii has set a new record. The 15-year-old high school freshman has become the youngest player to achieve the rank of 7th-dan.

7)   The Japanese singer Hideki Saijo has died. He was 63.

His agency said Saijo died of acute heart failure late Wednesday in a hospital in Yokohama, near Tokyo.

Saijo was born in Hiroshima City and made his debut at the age of 17. He won a huge following, especially among young women, for his energetic singing style.

8)   In the United States, Texas Governor Greg Abbott says at least 10 people are dead and 10 others were injured in a shooting at a high school in Santa Fe on Friday morning.

Explosive devices were also found at the school and at another site nearby.

Authorities say gunshots were fired at around 7:30, and that many of the victims are students.

A male suspect believed to be a student at the school has been detained and another is being questioned.

9)   North Korea has demanded that South Korea halt its ongoing joint military drills with the United States as a precondition to resume inter-Korean dialogue.

10)   Hawaii’s Kilauea volcano has erupted explosively, sending a cloud of ash about 9 kilometers into the sky.

The US Geological Survey says the massive eruption took place near the volcano’s summit at 4:17 AM Thursday local time.

11)   The World Health Organization says the Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has spread to an urban area.

The WHO said on Thursday that an Ebola case had been confirmed in Mbandaka, a city in the northwest of the country with a population of around a million.

12)   The Japanese government has notified the World Trade Organization that it is prepared to take countermeasures against US tariffs on steel and aluminum.

The government announced that it is ready to implement rebalancing measures worth about 440 million dollars. The tariffs that the US is imposing on Japan come to about that much.

The notification is a procedure required under international trade rules, if Japan actually takes the reciprocal step against the US in the future. Specific items have not yet been mentioned.

1)   An elementary schoolgirl was attacked by a man as she walked to school in Tokyo’s Koto Ward on Friday morning.

According to police, the incident occurred at around 7:50 a.m. in Ogibashi, Fuji TV reported. The girl, a 4th-grade student, told police that a man suddenly came up behind her, grabbed her left wrist and slashed the palm of her left hand with a box cutter, and then ran away without saying a word.

2)   Shoei Sugita, a biology professor at Utsunomiya University, went so far as theorize that the Tickt crow was “almost definitely” kept as a pet at some point in its life, as it appears to be especially relaxed around humans, even occasionally perching on the arm or shoulders of people in the area.

3)   U.S. President Donald Trump said Thursday he will meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on June 12 in Singapore for what will be the first-ever summit between the two countries.

4)    U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday pulled the United States out of an international nuclear deal with Iran, raising the risk of conflict in the Middle East, upsetting European allies and casting uncertainty over global oil supplies.

5)   Days before President Trump was to decide whether to pull out of the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, Mr. Netanyahu presented records from a secret warehouse in Tehran, making the case that Iranian leaders had deceived the international nuclear agency when they insisted their nuclear program was for peaceful purposes. Israeli spies seized the documents in an overnight raid in January, a senior Israeli official said.

6)   Japan’s golf venue for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics has granted full membership to women for the first time, after lifting a ban under pressure from Games authorities.

The upscale Kasumigaseki Country Club told AFP it had upgraded three women to full membership after agreeing last year to admit female members, following criticism from the International Olympic Committee.

7)   With international attention long focused on North Korea’s nuclear weapons program, Kim Jong Un’s relatively unknown economic reforms could be behind his power at home and his recent diplomatic moves, experts say.

Nuclear arms development and economic reforms make up Kim’s “pyongjin” dual-track policy that he announced during a Central Committee meeting of the ruling Workers’ Party of Korea on March 31, 2013.

Pyongyang has declared it has accomplished its military objectives, namely completing its nuclear program and developing intercontinental ballistic missiles to deter the threat of attack from the United States.

In the meantime, Kim has steadily introduced market mechanisms to the country’s economy.

8)   A former top aide to Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on May 10 testified before committees of both chambers of the Diet about his meetings with officials of the Kake Educational Institution, whose successful bid to open a veterinary medicine faculty has raised suspicions of Abe’s political involvement.

Tadao Yanase appeared as an unsworn witness in a session of the Lower House Budget Committee in the morning. His testimony came one month after it was revealed that a document compiled by an Ehime prefectural government employee quotes him as saying that the project planned by the institution was “a matter related to the prime minister.”

9)   A ruling party lawmaker reluctantly retracted his remarks about telling young women to have at least three children or else the taxes paid by other people’s offspring will cover their care in nursing homes.

Kanji Kato, 72, made the comments on May 10 at a meeting of the Hosoda faction of the Liberal Democratic Party.

“I always tell brides and grooms at wedding parties that I would like them to have three or more children,” he said. “We need three or more children from those people to make up for couples who cannot bear a child no matter what they do.”

10)   Couples in de facto marriages have sued the government over a legal provision that requires either the wives or husbands to give up their surnames.

The seven men and women filed their lawsuits against local authorities and the central government on May 10 with the Tokyo District Court, its Tachikawa Branch and the Hiroshima District Court. They are represented by the same group of lawyers, led by Tokyo-based Fujiko Sakakibara.

The plaintiffs argue that inequality exists in the current legal system that recognizes marriages of couples with one surname but denies that status to couples who want to keep separate surnames.

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先生がとても凹んでいてどうしたの？と聞くと私の１つ前のクラス(6:30am〜)で何年も教えていた男の子のお父様から「今日で終わりにします！」と突然言われたそうな。なんでも中学受験の準備をするためだとか。それにしても突然でかなりのショックだったようだ。また落ち着いたら戻ってくるよと慰めてみたけれどどうだろうか。

1)   Tatsuya Yamaguchi, a member of Japanese all-male pop group Tokio, has expressed his intent to leave the five-member band after coming under fire for kissing a high school student against her will, other group members revealed Wednesday.

2)   Bus drivers in Okayama working with Ryobi Group have taken to the streets in an unusual form of protest. While technically on strike, they are continuing to drive their routes while refusing to take fares from passengers.

3)   Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe sought public support Tuesday for his long-cherished goal of revising the country’s war-renouncing constitution amid widening scandals that have hurt his government’s popularity.

4)   Medical Services Law will prohibit such misleading claims as “100 percent safe surgery,” with fines on violators. It will also, in principle, ban the inclusion of patients’ testimonies of their experiences and touting medical treatments that use unapproved drugs.

5)   Dozens of thrill seekers got more than they bargained for when a roller coaster stalled, leaving them hanging face down 30 meters above the ground for up to two hours.

6)   The president of Chisso Corp., whose mercury pollution caused the debilitating Minamata disease that sickened tens of thousands, sparked outrage for saying that redress for the victims has ended.

7)   NHK has learnt that a convicted thief told police he escaped from prison because he wasn’t allowed to be the leader of the inmates.

8)   Tatsuma Hirao escaped from the low-security prison in Imabari City in Ehime Prefecture on April 8th. He was recaptured on Monday in Hiroshima City, after more than 3 weeks on the run.

9)   A government survey suggests Japanese consumers felt negative about the economic outlook in April for the first time in 2 months.

The Cabinet Office monthly survey of 8,400 households asks consumers how they feel about the coming 6 months.

10)   Japan’s annual summertime “Cool Biz” campaign has started, with people across the country encouraged to dress casually to use less air conditioning.

During the 5-month campaign, the Environment Ministry is urging people to set air conditioners to around 28 degrees Celsius at work and home.

南北の話とTOKIOの話にて。

1)   North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in embraced after pledging on Friday to work for the “complete denuclearisation.

2)    Police investigated a record 1,813 cases involving minors who fell victim to sexual and other crimes perpetrated through the use of social media in 2017, official data showed Thursday.

3)   A Japanese TV network has released a statement by an employee who is believed to have been sexually harassed by a former Finance Ministry top bureaucrat. This comes after the ministry acknowledged the misconduct by the former administrative vice finance minister, Junichi Fukuda, and punished him.

4)    member of a Japanese all-male pop group has been referred to prosecutors for suspected indecent behavior with a high-school girl. The news is having widespread repercussions.

Tatsuya Yamaguchi, a 46-year-old member of the band TOKIO, is accused of forcibly kissing a high-school girl at his home in February this year. Tokyo police have sent papers to prosecutors on suspicion of an indecent sexual assault.

5)   Japan’s Foreign Ministry has lodged a protest with the South Korean government over a menu item that will be served at the dinner being prepared for the inter-Korean summit scheduled for Friday.

Japan’s Foreign Ministry says a dessert has a map of the Korean Peninsula along with the Takeshima Islands in the Sea of Japan on the surface.

6)   Chinese scientists say the nuclear test site in North Korea that the country has pledged to scrap has been rendered unsafe by a mountain collapse.

7)   A stabbing spree on Friday evening in China’s Shaanxi Province has left seven junior high school students dead and 12 others injured.

Police have arrested a 28-year-old man, who is believed to be a former student. Police have been quoted as saying that the assailant wanted to exact revenge, because he was bullied during his school years.

8)   The prolonged war in Syria is resulting in donor fatigue among countries struggling to provide humanitarian aid to people displaced by the fighting.

The participants pledged new aid measures and raised 4.4 billion dollars. But the amount fell short of the UN target of 6 billion dollars because the United States has refused to contribute.

9)   Japan’s fast food sector is set to get more competitive with the arrival of another player from the US. Fatburger is the latest in a line of foreign chains aiming to take a bite out of the market.

The Fatburger line-up is slightly more expensive than most afast food here in Japan.

10)   Japanese airline All Nippon Airways is planning to introduce a new type of Airbus A380 with cabins that are equipped with novel bench-style seats.

The group-friendly seating will be available on 3 Airbus A380 airliners going into service between Japan and Hawaii. The flights will begin next spring.

セクハラ問題と北のお話。最近話題が難しい。^^

1)   Japanese Finance Minister Taro Aso said Thursday he has no intention of stepping down over a sexual harassment scandal involving the ministry’s top official.

2)   Japan’s consumer prices edged up 0.9 percent in March, government data showed Friday, but inflation was slightly weaker than the previous month and still far below a longstanding target. Japan has notched up eight straight quarters of economic growth — the longest positive run since the “bubble” boom days.

3)   Trump turned down Prime Minister Abe’s top economic and trade priorities. Principal among them: allowing Japan an exemption from new U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs and persuading Trump to re-join the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal.

4)   North and South Korea have installed a direct phone link between their leaders. South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un are to use the hotline before their planned summit next Friday.

5)   A Japanese Cabinet minister will meet women reporters and others to grasp the full picture of sexual harassment in the media industry.

The top bureaucrat at the Finance Ministry tendered his resignation on Wednesday in connection with allegations that he made sexually harassing remarks to women journalists.

Women’s Empowerment Minister Seiko Noda suspects that other female employees of media companies may have experienced sexual misconduct.

6)   The newly-discovered email says that on the same day the Ehime officials were to meet Tadao Yanase, who was the prime minister’s secretary at the time. The Ehime document quotes Yanase as saying the school project was a “matter related to the prime minister.” Yanase says he did not meet the Ehime officials as far as he can recall.

7)   Japan and Malaysia have concluded an agreement on the transfer of defense equipment and cooperation in defense technology.

This comes as Japan has been signing similar deals with the United States, European and Asian countries to transfer patrol planes, radars and other defense hardware and technology.

8)   A 10-day-old girl has become the first baby to appear on the floor of the US Senate during a vote.

Senator Tammy Duckworth of the Democratic Party brought her daughter, Maile, to the chamber on Thursday.

On Wednesday, the Senate unanimously approved a change to its rules to allow senators’ children under the age of one to be brought into the chamber during votes.

9)   The administration of US President Donald Trump has unveiled measures to expand exports of domestically produced weapons.

The measures announced on Thursday include broadening the range of drones that can be exported, and allowing US firms to proceed directly with sales to foreign governments.

But US defense contractors were critical, saying the move allowed Chinese drone manufacturers to increase their share of the global market.

10)   NHK has uncovered hundreds of instances in which inspection data at the Japanese automaker Subaru was falsified.

The alterations were happening on a regular basis.

A probe has revealed that workers at a plant near Tokyo have falsified inspection data on fuel efficiency and exhaust gases for the past several years.

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