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20081010
Japan - History - US - Real Estate
"Nikkei tumbles 9.6 percent on crisis fears." ... "Japan's key stock index plunged a stunning 9.6 percent Friday to close out its worst week in history as frantic investors worried about a global recession dumped stocks after huge losses on Wall Street." ... "The benchmark Nikkei 225 index tumbled 881.06 points to 8,276.43, its lowest since May 2003. It was its biggest one-day percentage loss since the stock market crash of October 1987." ... "The index dropped by more than 11 percent at one point but recovered modestly in the afternoon." ... "Since last Friday, the Nikkei has lost nearly a quarter of its value." ... "Mid-sized insurer Yamato Life Insurance Co. [Company] went bankrupt Friday, becoming the first major Japanese financial company to collapse on the fallout from the U.S. [United States] credit crisis. On Thursday, New City Investment Corp.'s [Corporation's] bankruptcy filing made it Japan's first real-estate investment trust to fail." -By Shino Yuasa -AP via -Google

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20081008
Japan - Hong Kong - Indonesia - Taiwan
"Asian markets crumble, Nikkei 225 dives 9.4%: Hang Seng loses 8.2%, S&P/ASX 200 off 5%, Indonesia index slumps 10.4%." ... "Asian markets crumbled Wednesday, as investors alarmed by a deteriorating financial markets situation dumped blue-chip stocks to raise cash, sending several indexes tumbling down to multi-year lows." ... ""It's not just the hedge-funds, everybody is selling ... And there are no buyers," said Dale Tsang, managing director at Imperial Dragon Asset Management Co. in Hong Kong. "There is a state of panic, for cash. Everybody needs cash."" ... ""No, I haven't seen anything like this, and I don't think anybody has seen anything like this before, except those who are over 75 years old and have seen the Great Depression," Tsang added." ... "Japan's Nikkei 225 Average tumbled the most to close 952.5 points, or 9.4%, lower at 9,203.32 for its worst single-day percentage drop in years. The broader Topix index lost 8% to 899.01. Both benchmarks declined for a fifth straight session." ... "In Taipei [Taiwan's capital], the Taiex tumbled 5.8% to 5,206.40, its lowest level since July 2003. " -By V. Phani Kumar -MarketWatch

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20080509
• Consumers - Food - Safety - Humans - Health - Law - Politics - Animals - Agriculture - Business - Kan - US - Japan - "Government asks court to block wider testing for mad cow." ... "The [Republican President] Bush administration on Friday urged a federal appeals court to stop meatpackers from testing all their animals for mad cow disease, but a skeptical judge questioned whether the government has that authority." ... "The government seeks to reverse a lower court ruling that allowed Arkansas City, Kan.[Kansas]-based Creekstone Farms Premium Beef to conduct more comprehensive testing to satisfy demand from overseas customers in Japan and elsewhere." ... "Less than 1 percent of slaughtered cows are currently tested for the disease under Agriculture Department guidelines. The agency argues that more widespread testing does not guarantee food safety and could result in a false positive that scares consumers." ... "Mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy, can be fatal to humans who eat tainted beef. Three cases of mad cow disease have been discovered in the U.S. [United States] since 2003." -By Sam Hananel -AP via -SFGate.com

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20080317
• World - US dollar - Japan yen - Swiss franc - EU Euro - Oil - History - "Stocks Tumble Around World, Dollar Declines After Fed Cuts Rate." ... "Stocks fell around the world and the dollar tumbled after the Federal Reserve cut its discount interest rate at an emergency meeting and JPMorgan Chase & Co. agreed to buy Bear Stearns Cos. for $2 a share. Bonds, gold and crude oil climbed." ... "Global stock markets lost $2.4 trillion in market value from a peak in October as of March 14. That partly reflects the slump in the U.S. dollar." ... "The dollar weakened to as low as 95.76 yen, a level not seen since August 1995, from 99.09 on March 14. It dropped to a record low of $1.5903 per euro and an all-time low of 0.9658 Swiss francs." ... "Gold for immediate delivery climbed as much as 3 percent to a record $1,032 an ounce as investors sought a haven against the weakening dollar. Crude oil gained as much as 1.4 percent to a high of $111.80 a barrel." ... "Bear Stearns plunged 90 percent to $2.88 after JPMorgan agreed to buy the bank." ... "Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., the fourth-largest U.S. securities firm, lost 27 percent to $28.60." -By Patrick Rial -Bloomberg 

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20080122
• World - US - India - Japan - China - Hong Kong - South Korea - Singapore - Indonesia - "World markets continue to sink over U.S. woes: India exchange briefly suspended after 9% drop tied to investor pessimism." ... "Japan's Nikkei 225 index, the benchmark for Asia's biggest bourse, plummeted 5.7 percent to close at 12,573.05 on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, the lowest close since Sept. 8, 2005. In China, the Shanghai Composite Index fell 7.2 percent to its lowest close since early August." ... "Trading was halted in India when the Sensex index plummeted 9.75 percent within minutes of opening. Hong Kong's Hang Seng index dropped 8 percent by midday after diving 5.5 percent the day before." ... "Asian markets have fallen sharply since the start of the year: Japan's benchmark index has sunk nearly 17 percent, while the Hang Seng is down a stunning 22 percent." ... "That slide continued Tuesday, with benchmark indices in China, South Korea and Singapore falling at least 4 percent. Australia's benchmark index slid 7.1 percent and Indonesia's market was down 9 percent." -AP via -MSNBC 

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20080121
• US - India - Japan - Hong Kong - China - Australia - South Korea - Singapore - "Asian stocks tumble on US recession fears." ... "Asian stock markets fell sharply on Monday as a $140bn fiscal stimulus package outlined on Friday by [Republican] President George Bush did nothing to assuage investor fears of a recession for Asia’s most important trading partner." ... "India led the declines, with the benchmark Sensex Index plunging nearly 11 per cent at one point, before finishing down about 7 per cent." ... "In Tokyo [Japan's capital], the Nikkei 225 slumped 3.9 per cent to close near a 27-month low of 13,325.94. The index has lost a quarter of its value in the past six months." ... "Hong Kong stocks dropped 5.5 per cent while H shares, or Hong Kong-listed shares of mainland Chinese companies, skidded 7.1 per cent. Australian stocks extended their losing run to an 11th straight session, falling 2.9 per cent. South Korea’s Kospi shed 3 per cent to 1,683.56 as exporters LG Philips LCD dropped 1.1 per cent to Won40,400 and Hyundai Motor dropped 0.5 per cent to Won67,100. Singapore was down over 5 per cent in late afternoon trading." -By Lindsay Whipp and Joe Leahy -FT.com

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20080120
• Israel - Electronic - Cars - Manufacturing - Transportation - Technology - Company - Environmental - Health - Politics - California - US - Japan - France - "Israel Looks to Electric Cars." ... "The Israeli government announced a major initiative to push the nation's drivers toward electric cars on Monday, a move meant to both lessen dependence on foreign oil and address the environmental and health hazards of gas-burning vehicles." ... "It aligns policy makers and a major car company with an outfit prepared to build hundreds of thousands of electric charging stations across the country. In an interview with TIME, Israeli President Shimon Peres called the project, "an experimental lab, a pilot project, before it's applied to other, bigger industrialized nations."" ... "Automaker Renault-Nissan will manufacture the cars and Better Place, a California start-up founded by former SAP executive Shai Agassi, will build the infrastructure, which may eventually consist of 500,000 charging points and up to 200 battery-exchange stations." ... "The [Renault-Nissan] Japanese-French auto alliance has separately said that it will manufacture a hybrid by 2010 and an all-electric car by 2012." ... "Agassi figures that if he adds electrical outlets to at least 500,000 of Israel's three to four million parking spots, people will feel like they can charge their cars whenever they need to." ... "For longer drives, customers will be able to pull into a battery-swap station and get a fresh battery." -By Barbara Kiviat with contributions by Tim McGirk -TIME.com

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20071203
• United States - Debt - Government - Fiscal - Politics - People - Parents - Accounting - History - Homeowners - Japan - China - Britain - Saudi Arabia - Oil - Countries - "National Debt Grows $1 Million a Minute." ... "Like a ticking time bomb, the national debt is an explosion waiting to happen. It's expanding by about $1.4 billion a day -- or nearly $1 million a minute." ... "What's that mean to you?" ... "It means almost $30,000 in debt for each man, woman, child and infant in the United States." ... "Even if you've escaped the recent housing and credit crunches and are coping with rising fuel prices, you may still be headed for economic misery, along with the rest of the country. That's because the government is fast straining resources needed to meet interest payments on the national debt, which stands at a mind-numbing $9.13 trillion." ... "And like homeowners who took out adjustable-rate mortgages, the government faces the prospect of seeing this debt -- now at relatively low interest rates -- rolling over to higher rates, multiplying the financial pain." ... "The national debt -- the total accumulation of annual budget deficits -- is up from $5.7 trillion when [Republican] President Bush took office in January 2001 and it will top $10 trillion [$10,000,000,000,000.00] sometime right before or right after he leaves in January 2009." ... "Foreign governments and investors now hold some $2.23 trillion -- or about 44 percent -- of all publicly held U.S. debt. That's up 9.5 percent from a year earlier." ... "Japan is first with $586 billion, followed by China ($400 billion) and Britain ($244 billion). Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries account for $123 billion, according to the Treasury." ... "Democrats are blaming the runup in deficit spending on [Republican President] Bush and his Republican allies who controlled Congress for the first six years of his presidency." (1, 2, 3) -By Tom Raum -AP via -ChicagoTribune 

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20070912
• US - Seniors - History - International - Japan - "U.S. deaths rise by 50,000 in 2005, a disappointing reversal." ... "he number of deaths in the United States rose in 2005 after a sharp decline the year earlier, a disappointing reversal that suggests the 2004 numbers were a fluke." ... "But, U.S. life expectancy inched up to 77.9 from the previous record, 77.8, recorded for 2004. The increase was more dramatic in contrast with 1995, when life expectancy was 75.8, and 1955, when it was 69.6." ... "The U.S. continues to lag behind at least 40 other nations. Andorra, a tiny country in the Pyrenees mountains between France and Spain, has the longest life expectancy, at 83.5 years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau of 2004 international data. It was followed by Japan, Macau (which is part of China), San Marino and Singapore." -AP via -IHT.com 

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20070827
• China - Environmental - Health - Politics - Air - Land - Water - Coal- Weather - Science - Industrial - History - International - South Korea - Japan - USA - California - Los Angeles - EU - Sports - Children - "As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes." ... "No country in history has emerged as a major industrial power without creating a legacy of environmental damage that can take decades and big dollops of public wealth to undo." ... "But just as the speed and scale of China’s rise as an economic power have no clear parallel in history, so its pollution problem has shattered all precedents. Environmental degradation is now so severe, with such stark domestic and international repercussions, that pollution poses not only a major long-term burden on the Chinese public but also an acute political challenge to the ruling Communist Party. And it is not clear that China can rein in its own economic juggernaut." ... "Public health is reeling. Pollution has made cancer China’s leading cause of death, the Ministry of Health says. Ambient air pollution alone is blamed for hundreds of thousands of deaths each year. Nearly 500 million people lack access to safe drinking water." ... "Chinese cities often seem wrapped in a toxic gray shroud. Only 1 percent of the country’s 560 million city dwellers breathe air considered safe by the European Union. Beijing [China's capital] is frantically searching for a magic formula, a meteorological deus ex machina, to clear its skies for the 2008 Olympics." ... "Environmental woes that might be considered catastrophic in some countries can seem commonplace in China: industrial cities where people rarely see the sun; children killed or sickened by lead poisoning or other types of local pollution; a coastline so swamped by algal red tides that large sections of the ocean no longer sustain marine life." ... "China is choking on its own success. The economy is on a historic run, posting a succession of double-digit growth rates. But the growth derives, now more than at any time in the recent past, from a staggering expansion of heavy industry and urbanization that requires colossal inputs of energy, almost all from coal, the most readily available, and dirtiest, source." ... "China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea [capital], and Tokyo [Japan's capital]. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles [California, USA] originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research." (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) -By Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley -NYTimes 

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20070810
• Worldwide - United States - EU- France - Netherlands - Japan - Germany - Home - "Mortgage Losses Echo in Europe and on Wall Street." ... "Turmoil in the home loan market ricocheted from the United States to Europe and back again yesterday as stocks on Wall Street suffered their biggest one-day decline since February, reflecting growing concerns about tightening credit worldwide." ... "Big losses on packages of American home loan securities sold to investors turned up unexpectedly in French and Dutch [Netherlands] banks yesterday, adding to worries at hedge funds and financial institutions around the globe. With trillions of dollars of securities outstanding, those announcements raised expectations that more problems may soon emerge in other unlikely places as well." ... "The spreading fears forced the European Central Bank and, later, the Federal Reserve to inject billions of dollars into the financial system to help prevent borrowing and lending in credit markets from freezing up." ... "Japan’s central bank followed suit, injecting more than $8 billion into money markets as stocks there plummeted Friday morning." ... "Citing “tensions in the euro money market,” the European Central Bank in Frankfurt [Germany] lent more than $130 billion overnight at a rate of 4 percent to tamp down a surge in the rates banks charge each other for very short-term loans. The Federal Reserve injected $24 billion into the United States banking system to keep its benchmark overnight lending rate at 5.25 percent, after it opened this morning at 5.5 percent." (1, 2) -By Vikas Bajaj and Mark Landler with contributions by Julia Werdigier, James Kanter, and Julie Creswell -NYTimes 

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20070803
• US - Saudi Arabia - Military - Terrorism - Oil - Politics - Japan - Italy - Germany - Georgia - History - "Gingrich says war on terror 'phony': Former speaker says energy independence is key." ... "Former House Speaker [Republican] Newt Gingrich said Thursday the [Republican President] Bush administration is waging a "phony war" on terrorism, warning that the country is losing ground against the kind of Islamic radicals who attacked the country on Sept. 11, 2001." ... "A more effective approach, said Gingrich, would begin with a national energy strategy aimed at weaning the country from its reliance on imported oil and some of the regimes that petro-dollars support." ... ""None of you should believe we are winning this war. There is no evidence that we are winning this war," the ex-Georgian told a group of about 300 students attending a conference for collegiate conservatives." ... "He was unstinting in his criticism of his fellow Republicans, in the White House and on Capitol Hill." ... ""We were in charge for six years," he said, referring to the period between 2001 and early 2007, when the GOP controlled the White House and both houses of Congress. "I don't think you can look and say that was a great success."" ... "He reserved his most pointed criticism for the administration's handling of the global campaign against terrorist groups." ... ""We've been engaged in a phony war," said Gingrich. "The only people who have been taking this seriously are the combat military."" ... ""We used to be a serious country. When we got attacked at Pearl Harbor, we took on Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany," he said, referring to World War II." ... ""We beat all three in less than four years. We're about to enter the seventh year of this phony war against ... [terrorist groups], and we're losing."" ... ""First of all, we have to have a national energy strategy, which basically says to the Saudis, 'We're not going to rely on you,' " he said." ... "The United States imports about 14 million barrels of oil a day, making up two-thirds of its total consumption." -By Bob Deans -AJC 

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20070707
• Global - Climate - Earth - Music - Politics - Australia - United States - Japan - China - South Africa - Brazil - Germany - "Live Earth Series Starts in Sydney." ... "The Live Earth global [music] concert series kicked off Saturday with an aboriginal group dancing and singing a traditional welcome at the first venue in Sydney [Australia]." ... "Tribal leaders with white-painted bodies and shaking eucalyptus fronds were the first of more than 150 performers at the eight concert, 24-hour series to raise awareness about climate change." ... "The performance was immediately followed by a video greeting from former [Democratic] Vice President Al Gore, whose campaign to force global warming onto the international political agenda inspired the event." ... "The biggest names will appear at Live Earth concerts in London [UK] and the United States, with more modest lineups of mostly local and regional acts in Australia, Japan, China, South Africa, Brazil and Germany." -AP via -Guardian.co.uk 

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• http://LiveEarth.org

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20061222
• Noteworthy - Japan- US - World - Auto - Technology - Workers - Politics - History - Fuel - "Toyota’s Sales Projections Show It Surpassing G.M.." ... "Toyota Motor said today it plans to sell 9.34 million vehicles next year, a figure that analysts said would put it ahead of troubled General Motors as the world’s largest auto company." ... "Toyota reported global group sales this year of 8.8 million cars and trucks, below G.M.’s 2006 sales forecast of 9.2 million vehicles. But the figures released today showed the two rival car giants on starkly different trajectories, with Toyota expecting to add a half million vehicle sales next year, at a time when G.M. is shuttering plants and laying off workers." ... "Surpassing G.M. would be a crowning achievement for Toyota, a company that got its start in the 1930s by reverse-engineering G.M. and Ford cars, and that spent decades catching up with Detroit. It would also end G.M.’s 81-year reign over the global auto industry, and mark another step in the rise of Asian carmakers." ... "Analysts also said reaching the top would not exhaust Toyota’s opportunities for growth. They said Toyota will continue to gain in the American market, where higher gas prices have increased the popularity of smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles." ... "Toyota’s rise would also prove a victory of sorts for its unique corporate culture, the so-called Toyota Way, which is rooted in an obsession with craftsmanship and constant improvement, or “kaizen.”" -By Martin Fackler -NYTimes 

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20061107
• US - Iraq - Military - People - TV - Money - Oil - Politics - Japan - New York - "Rupert Murdoch -- who once predicted Iraq war could lead to $20/barrel oil --described war casualties as "minute"." ... "On November 6, News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch reportedly said at a conference in Tokyo [Japan] that U.S. casualties in Iraq, "by the terms of any previous war are quite minute," as the weblog Democratic Underground noted. He further stated: "I believe it was right to go in there. I believe that certainly the execution that has followed that has included many mistakes. But that's easy to say after the event." Murdoch, whose conservative media empire includes Fox News Channel, the New York Post, and The Weekly Standard, vocally supported the war in 2003, citing potential economic benefits. As of November 3, according to CNN, a total of 2,836 U.S. soldiers have been killed since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003." -MediaMatters.org 

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