The following is the latest list of selected news summaries by Kyodo News.
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Japan mulls bringing forward COVID booster shots for all: PM Kishida
TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said Tuesday the government will consider bringing forward COVID-19 vaccine booster shots for all people as much as possible, amid concern about a further spread of the Omicron variant of the coronavirus.
In an interview with Kyodo News, Kishida said he will make the country's anti-virus measures "fully operational" so people can feel safe at a time when there are still unknowns about the new variant.
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Japan to implement compensation rules for losses by Fukushima rumors
TOKYO - The Japanese government on Tuesday decided to set, within a year, standards for compensating businesses that suffer losses due to rumors that may emerge when Japan starts discharging treated radioactive water from the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant into the sea.
As neighboring countries such as China and South Korea have expressed worries over the release of the treated water from the Fukushima Daiichi power plant slated for spring of 2023, the action plan includes having the International Atomic Energy Agency evaluate the safety of the water to secure transparency.
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Japan PM urges South Korea to abide by 2015 agreement on "comfort women"
TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida on Tuesday urged South Korea to abide by a 2015 bilateral agreement concerning the issue of wartime "comfort women" amid frosty ties between Tokyo and Seoul.
"At least the promise between states must be kept, or any discussion from now on will be meaningless," Kishida told Kyodo News in an interview. As then foreign minister, he played an instrumental role in reaching the agreement that settled the comfort women issue "finally and irreversibly."
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Former Japan ruling lawmaker charged with illegal loan brokering
TOKYO - A former lawmaker of Komeito, the junior party in Japan's ruling coalition, and three others were indicted Tuesday for illegally mediating public loans to companies, including some hit by the coronavirus pandemic, prosecutors said.
Kiyohiko Toyama, who stepped down as a Komeito lawmaker in February, and Akira Shibuya, who used to work as an aide to Masataka Ota, a former House of Representatives member of the ruling party, are suspected of separately receiving about 10 million yen ($87,000) in return for helping to secure loans from Japan Finance Corp, even though the two were not licensed to do so.
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N. Korea's ruling party convenes key meeting to review 2021 policies
BEIJING - North Korea's ruling party convened a plenary meeting of the Central Committee on Monday to review its policies for 2021, state-run media reported Tuesday, as the nation's economy is believed to remain stagnant amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un presided over the gathering of the Workers' Party of Korea, the official Korean Central News Agency said, while it did not elaborate on when the meeting will be wrapped up.
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Gov't retracts decision to shut out examinees with close Omicron contact
TOKYO - The Japanese government has retracted an earlier decision and will allow examinees who had close contact with people infected with the Omicron coronavirus variant to take university entrance exams if they have tested negative and have no symptoms.
The new decision, announced by the education ministry Monday, will apply to exams for state-run and private universities as well as for unified entrance exams next month, in a policy shift from previous guidelines barring such examinees from taking tests.
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Chinese man wanted by Tokyo police for alleged military-linked fraud
TOKYO - Tokyo police have obtained an arrest warrant for a former Chinese student in Japan on suspicion of attempting to illegally purchase Japanese security software on the orders of the Chinese military, investigative sources said Tuesday.
The 36-year-old man, identified as Wang Jianbin, has already left Japan, however, the sources said. The police plan to place him on Interpol's international wanted list.
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Japan's Nov. jobless rate rises to 2.8% as people seek better jobs
TOKYO - Japan's unemployment rate in November edged up to 2.8 percent from the previous month as an economic recovery from the coronavirus fallout prompted more people to leave their jobs in search of better ones, the government said Tuesday.
The seasonally adjusted jobless rate rose 0.1 percentage point from the previous month for the first increase in six months, after the COVID-19 state-of-emergency measure asking people to refrain from nonessential outings was lifted in October following a significant drop in the number of infections.
