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/ 14 September 2007
Japan’s first lunar orbiter successfully blasted into space on Friday on the most extensive mission to investigate the moon since the United States’s Apollo programme began nearly four decades ago, officials said. A domestically developed rocket launched with no glitches from a small island in southern Japan.
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/ 12 September 2007
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe abruptly announced his resignation on Wednesday after a year in power dogged by scandals, an election rout and a crisis over Japan’s support for United States-led operations in Afghanistan. The hawkish Abe, who took office promising to boost Japan’s global security profile, had seen his clout dwindle.
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/ 12 September 2007
The head of Microsoft’s gaming business in Japan promised more role-playing game software on Wednesday to attract fans in a market where its Xbox 360 console has struggled against offerings from Nintendo and Sony. Takashi Sensui, who heads Xbox operations in Japan, said Japanese prefer role-playing games.
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/ 5 September 2007
Japanese electronics maker Casio said on Wednesday it will launch a series of digital cameras specially designed for YouTube, the blockbuster video-sharing website. The new Exilim series has four models, all installed with a function to shoot and save videos in the best form to upload on YouTube, the company said.
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/ 5 September 2007
For those fed up with the family photos where one person is perpetually frowning, a new Japanese camera is said to automatically weed out pictures when a person isn’t smiling. Electronics giant Sony said on Wednesday it will begin sales this month of the compact "Cyber-shot T" series that can detect a smile and immediately drop the shutter.
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/ 5 September 2007
With her dyed-brown long hair and tight designer jeans, Shoko Tendo looks like any other stylish young Japanese woman — until she removes her shirt to reveal the vivid tattoos covering her back and most of her body. The author of Yakuza Moon, Tendo says that police efforts to eradicate the gangsters have merely made them harder to track.
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/ 2 September 2007
Young Boland javelin thrower Robert Oosthuizen will have the time of his life in Sunday’s javelin final at the 11th World Athletics Championships in Osaka. It took only two throws for the 20-year-old to secure a place alongside the big guns he used to watch on television with his father.
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/ 2 September 2007
Tyson Gay joined an exclusive club on Saturday in Osaka, Japan, by becoming only the third man ever to win three gold medals at a single world championships, overshadowing Meseret Defar’s 5 000m victory. Only fellow Americans Carl Lewis (1983 and 1987) and Maurice Greene (1999) have achieved the feat before.
Tyson Gay romped to the 200m world title on Thursday, giving him a rare sprint double at the World Athletics Championships. He joined an exclusive club that includes fellow Americans Maurice Greene and the disgraced Justin Gatlin as the only men to win both the 100m and 200m crowns.
Inmates at a major Japanese prison found marijuana growing naturally on the grounds, but instead of getting high, they went to the wardens. The prisoners found about 300 hemp shoots growing on the exercise ground of Abashiri Prison, located on Japan’s northern-most island of Hokkaido, Jiji Press and the <i>Yomiuri Shimbun</i> said.
Recovering Japanese giant Sony said on Wednesday it will introduce a new line-up of flat-screen televisions, including the largest on the market, in a bid to boost its mainstay electronics sales. Introducing 15 new models of its Bravia line, Sony said its top-end flagship model with a 70-inch (1,78m) screen will be the largest flat television commercially available.
South Africa’s woes continued on Tuesday at the 11th World Athletics Championships in Osaka, Japan, when sprinters Morne Nagel and Christiaan Krone failed to get past the first round. A poor first 30m put paid to Krone’s debut at world-championship level, but the Tukkies athlete went out with his pride intact.
Jamaican world record holder Asafa Powell admitted on Monday that he gave up during his world 100m final showdown with new champion Tyson Gay. ”When I saw I wasn’t in gold medal contention, I gave up. I just stopped running,” Powell told Reuters in an interview on Monday, less than 24 hours after he lost to the American.
Luke Kibet of Kenya won the marathon in 2 hours, 15 minutes and 59 seconds on Saturday, claiming the first gold medal of the 2007 track and field World Championships. Mubarak Hassan Shami of Qatar was second in 2:17,18, and fast-finishing Viktor Rothlin of Switzerland was third in 2:17,25.
South African swimming team captain Gerhard Zandberg was on top of the world after taking the 50m freestyle honours in the fastest time swam by a South African this year, at the International Swim Meeting in Tokyo, Japan, on Friday. Port Elizabeth’s Shaun Harris won the 50m freestyle B final in 22,87 seconds.
Smog is menacing Japanese cities for the first time in 30 years and cropping up in rural areas for the first time ever, alarming the government and prompting experts to point the finger at neighbouring China. Warnings for high levels of hazardous smog have been issued in a record 28 prefectures so far this year.
Sharp showed a 29mm-thick prototype TV on Wednesday, which the Japanese electronics maker said was the thinnest, lightest and lowest energy-consuming liquid crystal display (LCD) in the world. The 25kg display, which has a tuner and other TV features encased in its panel, weighs about half of current LCD panel TVs and consumes about half their power, according to Sharp.
A plane belonging to Taiwan’s China Airlines exploded and caught fire soon after landing on Japan’s southern island of Okinawa on Monday, but officials said all 165 people on board had escaped safely. The Boeing 737-800 plane, which had just arrived from Taipei, was already being evacuated when the left engine exploded.
Japan offered remorse for past atrocities on the anniversary on Wednesday of its World War II surrender as top leaders steered clear of a shrine at the heart of friction with neighbouring countries. Sixty-two years after Japan capitulated in the deadliest conflict in history, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe pledged that his country would not return to war.
The world’s oldest person, a Japanese woman who counted eating well and getting plenty of sleep as the secret of her longevity, died on Monday at age 114, a news report said. Yone Minagawa, who lived in a nursing home but was still sprightly late in life, died "of old age" on Monday evening, Kyodo News reported.
A powerful typhoon slammed into southern Japan on Thursday, injuring three people, disrupting air and land traffic and cutting power to thousands of houses. Packing winds of up to 144km/h and bringing heavy rains, typhoon Usagi landed on the coast of Kyushu Island shortly before 6pm local time from the Pacific, the meteorological agency said.
Hawkish Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe vowed to stay in his post despite a crushing defeat for his ruling camp in an upper house election, but policy gridlock loomed and Abe’s grip on his job was still uncertain. Voters outraged at a string of government scandals and gaffes and the bungling of pension records stripped Abe’s coalition of its upper house majority.
The Japanese love technology so much that now even sex toys are on the cutting edge. The "gPod," a phallic-shaped vibrator, is designed to respond automatically to sounds picked up by an accompanying handset, which can plug into anything from a telephone to a music player to a television.
A senior Japanese power-company official defended on Wednesday the speed with which the public was notified about damage at a quake-hit nuclear plant that resulted in a radioactive water leak. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has come under fire for being slow to inform the public about damage at the plant.
Sales of Sony’s PlayStation 3 (PS3) have finally topped the one million mark in Japan eight months after its launch, lagging well behind those of Nintendo’s Wii, research showed on Wednesday. Sony had sold just over 1,01-million PS3s as of July 15 since the console’s launch in Japan on November 11, according to Enterbrain, a Japanese publisher that tracks video-game console sales.
More than 12 000 people took refuge in evacuation centres in north-west Japan on Tuesday after an earthquake the previous day flattened homes, killing nine people and injuring more than 1 000, and triggered a leak of contaminated water from a nuclear plant.
Water containing some radioactive materials leaked from a nuclear power plant in Japan after a strong earthquake on Monday, a spokesperson for the firm running the facility said. "We have confirmed that water containing a slight amount of radioactive materials leaked out of the facility," said Shougo Fukuda, a spokesperson for Tokyo Electric.
Manchester United are hopeful of sealing the ”over-complicated” transfer of Argentina striker Carlos Tevez from West Ham within the next week or so, according to chief executive David Gill. United are determined to make Tevez their fourth summer signing following the arrivals of Owen Hargreaves, Nani and Anderson.
A strong earthquake killed at least seven people in Japan on Monday, injured more than 800, flattened houses and started a small fire at the world’s largest nuclear power plant, Japanese media and officials said. Two women in their 80s died when their homes collapsed due to the magnitude 6,8 tremor, centred in Niigata prefecture about 250km north-west of Tokyo.
Japan’s capital braced for a powerful typhoon on Sunday that killed five people and forced tens of thousands to evacuate across the country. Authorities warned that Typhoon Man-Yi, packing sustained winds of 108km/h and gusts of up to 162km/h, could continue to wreak havoc as it moved up the Pacific coast toward Tokyo.
A strong typhoon lashed southern Japan with high winds and heavy rain on Saturday, killing a boy, injuring dozens and forcing thousands of people to evacuate homes. Man-Yi struck the southernmost main island of Kyushu after storming through the islands of Okinawa on Friday, moving north-east at 35km/h.
A powerful typhoon struck the southern Japanese islands of Okinawa on Friday, pounding them with torrential rains and high winds before it heads north towards the nation’s main islands. Up to 500mm of rain was expected to fall on some parts of Japan’s southernmost main island of Kyushu by Saturday morning.