OLYMPIC SPOTLIGHT ON JAPAN: Japanese Winter Olympic delegation launched

Jan 18 06:31 AM US/Eastern

TOKYO, Jan. 18 (AP) - (Kyodo)—The Japanese delegation for the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver was officially launched at a ceremony in Tokyo on Monday.

Around 90 members of the delegation, which currently comprises 86 athletes and 102 officials for the Feb. 12-28 Games, were present at the ceremony, which was also attended by Prince Akishino and Princess Kiko and Japanese Olympic Committee President Tsunekazu Takeda.

"We are proud and honored to be picked to represent Japan and will head to Vancouver as a united team," said veteran ski jumper and Japan captain Takanobu Okabe, who will make his fourth Olympic appearance and at 39 become the oldest Japanese skier ever to compete in a Winter Olympics.

"We pledge to do our utmost in competition to try and give Japanese people something happy to talk about," said Okabe.

JOC chief Takeda handed the delegation flag to flag bearer and 38- year-old speed skater Tomomi Okazaki via Chef de Mission Seiko Hashimoto, a seven-time Olympian and the first woman ever to head the Japanese team at a Summer Games or Winter Olympics.

"You can expect a tough battle but I want you to have no fear, believe in yourselves and be fully focused on competing," upper house member Hashimoto told the athletes. "I know how much pressure there will be but that pressure must be turned into something positive."

Takeda added, "Do your utmost to respond to the expectations of a nation."

Japan is aiming to improve on its dismal showing in Turin four years ago, where it won just one medal, the gold delivered by figure skater Shizuka Arakawa.

 

 

 

 

Japan's medals hopes rest largely on figure skaters

Mao Asada,

 

 

 

 

Miki Ando

 

 

 

 

and Daisuke Takahashi

 

 

 

 

 

while women's moguls freestyle skier Aiko Uemura is also expected to make the podium.

 

 

 

Veteran ski jumper Noriaki Kasai will be the first athlete in history to represent Japan in six consecutive Winter Games.

 

 

Japan's ski jumpers and speed skaters could also deliver medals.

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CHINA & JAPAN: China has sovereignty over disputed gas field, Yang tells Okada

Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi reiterated to his Japanese counterpart Katsuya Okada on Sunday that Beijing has sovereignty over a disputed gas field it is developing, Foreign Ministry spokesman Ma Zhaoxu said Monday. Okada told Yang during a meeting in Tokyo that Japan will take countermeasures if China begins gas production in the Chunxiao gas field, arguing that Japan will regard such action as a violation of a 2008 agreement to jointly explore gas resources in the East China Sea. (AP)

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CHINA: No Pants Day

Uploaded on: January 18, 2010

Chinese started joining in on No Pants Day. This news from Guangzhou was about 20 youngsters who took off their trousers on subway to raise people’s awareness of the importance of environmental protection. The very low thumbs-up rate tells you that Chinese and westerners, even when they agree on a particular cause, might well go about expressing themselves in very different ways. I’m still not sure whether the connection of less clothing to and environmental protection is made…

CHINA: Foreign Journalists in Beijing Hit by E-Mail Hackers

Published: January 18, 2010

By EDWARD WONG

BEIJING — At least two foreign journalists living in Beijing have had their Google e-mail accounts hacked, a journalists’ advocacy group in China said Monday. The hackers changed settings so that all Gmail messages would be forwarded to unfamiliar addresses.

The journalists apparently discovered that their accounts had been hacked after Google announced last week that hackers had attempted sophisticated attacks on its security infrastructure. The attacks were traced to mainland China. Google also said that two Gmail accounts had been compromised and, separately, that dozens of people pressing for human rights in China had had their e-mail accounts hacked. In retaliation, Google had said it would talk to the Chinese government about ceasing the practice of self-censorship of its Chinese-language search engine, Google.cn, and that the search company could close down or curtail its operations in China.

The two foreign journalists recently victimized by hackers were among a large number of Gmail users in China who checked their accounts after Google’s announcement and discovered that their accounts had been compromised. In many of those cases, it was unclear exactly when the hackers had broken into the accounts. The attacks are separate from those that were aimed weeks ago at the security infrastructure of Google and more than 30 other companies and entities, most of them based in Silicon Valley, California.

One of the two journalists is a television reporter in the Beijing bureau of The Associated Press, which has one of the largest foreign news operations in China. E-mail messages in the reporter’s account were being forwarded to an e-mail address that the reporter did not recognize. The reporter said that other people the reporter knew in Beijing had suffered the same kind of attack, though none of the forwarding addresses were the same.

It is unclear whether the attacks are tied to the Chinese government, whose security forces sometimes closely monitor the activities of foreign journalists.

“We remind all members that journalists in China have been particular targets of hacker attacks in the last two years,” the journalists’ advocacy group, the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of China, said in its announcement of the recent attacks on the Gmail accounts.

Several well-known rights advocates in China said last week that their Gmail accounts had been hacked recently. The advocates include Ai Weiwei, the rebellious artist, and Teng Biao, a lawyer. In several instances, the accounts had been set by hackers to forward e-mail messages to unfamiliar addresses, as in the cases of the two journalists.

Meanwhile, a spokeswoman based in Asia for Google said Monday that the larger attacks on the Google infrastructure were part of an ongoing investigation and declined to comment further.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 19, 2010, in The International Herald Tribune.

Link to Original Article in The New York Times

JAPAN: Japan Airlines bankruptcy filing expected Tuesday

 

01.18.10, 04:00 AM EST 

By TOMOKO A. HOSAKA

Associated Press

TOKYO -- Japan Airlines is expected to file for bankruptcy protection Tuesday, ending months-long speculation about its fate and launching a massive overhaul to shed the fat and inefficiency that hobbled Asia's biggest airline.

With debts of 1.5 trillion yen ($16.5 billion) as of November, the carrier will go down in Japanese corporate history as one of its biggest failures.

Despite its woes, the airline's access to Asia is a prized asset for foreign airlines. Delta Air Lines Inc. is trying to lure Japan Airlines from its alliance with American Airlines.

The bankruptcy filing will be immediately followed by a restructuring plan crafted by a government-backed corporate turnaround body, according to media reports over the weekend. The government itself will offer assurances of support for the airline's rehabilitation and ongoing operations, the Nikkei financial daily said.

Investors Monday braced for a seemingly inevitable removal of the airline's shares from the stock exchange.

The issue, which has lost more than 90 percent of its value over the last week, tumbled another 29 percent Monday to 5 yen. The company is now essentially worthless, with a market capitalization of about 13.7 billion yen ($150 million) - the price of one Boeing 787 jet.

It's a humbling outcome for Japan's once-proud flagship carrier, called JAL for short, which was founded in 1951 and spent its early years owned by the state. Along with Japan's economy, it expanded quickly in the decades after World War II and was privatized in 1987.

But it soon became the victim of its own ambitions.

When Japan's property and stock bubble of the 1980s burst, risky investments in foreign resorts and hotels undermined its bottom line. JAL also shouldered growing pension and payroll costs, as well as a big network of unprofitable domestic routes it was politically obligated to maintain.

More recently, JAL's passenger traffic has slowed amid the global economic downturn, swine flu fears, competition from Japanese rival All Nippon Airways Co. and a spate of safety lapses that tarnished its image. It lost 131.2 billion yen ($1.4 billion) in the six months through September.

The restructuring plan in the works at the Enterprise Turnaround Initiative Corp. calls for about 15,600 job cuts - a third of JAL's work force - and will require the airline to cut the number of flights at home and abroad, according to Kyodo News agency.

Transportation Minister Seiji Maehara has said he wants to keep JAL flying through the restructuring process.

Delta Air Lines - the world's biggest airline operator - and rival American Airlines are courting JAL with massive financial offers as the U.S. carriers seek to expand their Asian networks.

Delta and its SkyTeam partners have offered $1 billion, including $500 million in cash to lure JAL away from American's oneworld alliance. American Airlines and its partners say they are ready to inject $1.4 billion cash into the Japanese airline, up from a previous $1.1 billion offer.

Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Link to Original Article in Forbes

CHINA: Google wins praise for its defiance of China over censorship

January 18, 2010

By Jessica Guynn

INTERNET

The Internet giant has won admiration from politicians, Silicon Valley business leaders and even its sharpest critics for threatening to bail out of the Asian nation.

A message of support for Google was left at a makeshift shrine outside its headquarters in Beijing. Google says it has a 31% market share in China, a distant second behind Baidu Inc. (Nelson Ching / Bloomberg / January 14, 2010)

The decision by Google Inc. to stand up to censorship in China is a marked turnaround from just a few years ago, when the Internet giant agreed to gag parts of its search engine to enter the lucrative China market.

Google's threat to bolt from the Asian nation has brought praise from politicians and Silicon Valley business leaders, along with many of the human-rights activists who had condemned the company for going along with China's restrictions on Internet access.

Whether Google's reversal sprang from political idealism or corporate realism, the Mountain View, Calif., company seems intent on winning back the glow of goodwill.

"The China situation was a ticking time bomb for Google's reputation, and they were smart to detonate it on their terms," said crisis management expert Eric Dezenhall.

Google, which had come under harsh criticism after its 2006 move into China, is widely known for its good deeds. It is donating $1 million and technology to relief organizations in Haiti to aid rescue efforts in the aftermath of the deadly magnitude 7.0 earthquake there. During climate talks in Copenhagen, it introduced a free tool to monitor deforestation around the world. Other free services track the spread of flu viruses and energy consumption.
But, as its influence and wealth swelled, so did concerns and unease with the company's rapid growth.

It has been accused of ignoring the rights of authors as it builds a massive digital library and not adequately protecting consumers' privacy with Gmail and other services. It has been derided for crushing old-media companies and disrupting other industries and amassing too much power in the online advertising market. Its actions have drawn attention from regulators in the U.S. and Europe.

The decision to enter China posed the greatest risk to its reputation. With more than 360 million Internet users, one of the largest and fastest-growing Internet audiences in the world, China is tempting for U.S. technology companies.

It's also treacherous. Yahoo Inc. ultimately withdrew from China after it provided information to Chinese authorities that led to the arrest of journalists. Yahoo sold its China business to Alibaba Group in 2005, while acquiring a 39% stake in Alibaba.

That Google would go along with China's restriction on Internet access, dubbed the "Great Firewall of China," drew strong condemnation from human-rights activists. It was also a source of controversy within Google itself.

At the time, the company consulted a cavalcade of China experts and ultimately concluded that the benefits of providing Chinese users with access to its search engine outweighed its concerns over censoring some results. But co-founder Sergey Brin, whose family left the Soviet Union when he was a child, was deeply ambivalent. "Google executives were always of two minds about that decision," said John Battelle, who covered the rise of Google in his 2005 book "The Search."

Google made significant investments in China, opening a research-and-development center, hiring key executives and a staff of hundreds. But Google never experienced the explosive growth in China that it did in the U.S. It struggled to compete with Baidu Inc., claiming a 31% market share, a distant second behind its Chinese competitor. Estimates put Google's China revenue last year at about $300 million, a fraction of its worldwide sales of $22 billion.

At the same time, Google said, it grew increasingly uneasy about the broad crackdown on Internet freedom in China and a series of confrontations with Chinese officials. The final straw, it said, was the hacking of information stored on its servers that targeted human-rights activists.

Google spokesman Gabriel Stricker said that the company had always been clear about monitoring conditions in China and that it would reconsider its "approach" if it were unable to give the Chinese people "increased access to information."

Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) said Google began signaling a change of heart in May 2008 when it said it would support legislation that pushes for more Internet freedom in China.

Google had previously joined other technology companies in opposing the bill.

Smith said David Drummond, Google's senior vice president and chief legal officer, paid him a visit in July, as did another Google representative last week, to express support for the Global Online Freedom Act with some "tweaks."

"This is a very big game changer when the leading search engine in the world all of a sudden has had enough," Smith said.

Google faces an uphill battle in seeking support for its new stance from other U.S. companies and from the U.S. government. The State Department on Friday said it would file a formal complaint with Chinese officials this week and ask for an investigation into the hacking attacks. But U.S. trade policy supports investment in China, Battelle said.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia who is writing a book about the Internet giant, cautioned that Google wasn't so much taking a stand against censorship as a stand against cyber-spying.
"Google deserves tremendous thanks and applause for standing up for the integrity of the Internet. But the free-speech part of this story is merely window dressing. We have to be careful about what we applaud Google for."

jessica.guynn@latimes.com

Link to the Original Article in the Los Angeles Times

2010 Michelin guide to TOKYO Restaurants & Hotels Now Available

The 3rd edition of the Michelin guide to Tokyo has just been released in the US!

From the back cover:

“With more Michelin starred restaurants than any other city in the world, Tokyo is now regarded as the global gourmet capital.”

Endowed with 110 years of experience in the world of gastronomy, the MICHELIN guide has a strong commitment to professionalism and independence.

For this 3rd edition, the MICHELIN inspectors, have once again combed Tokyo anonymously and made their recommendation of the best restaurants the city has to offer.

It will help you discover the treasure of Japanese and international gastronomy in Tokyo.

MICHELIN guide Tokyo also includes a selection of hotels in all price ranges and colorful maps to make locating recommended places easy.”

Click here to purchase the 2010 Michelin guide to Tokyo online now.