The following is the latest list of selected news summaries by Kyodo News.
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Japan PM pinning hopes on big-spending tourists to revive economy
TOKYO - Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida pledged Monday to revive the nation's pandemic-battered inbound tourism industry by setting a new goal of increasing foreign tourists' total spending to more than 5 trillion yen ($35 billion) annually.
In a policy speech marking the start of an extraordinary parliamentary session, Kishida also said the government will make use of the benefit of the Japanese yen's rapid depreciation while vowing to continue easing the country's coronavirus border controls.
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Japan to respond "resolutely" to speculative yen moves: finance chief
TOKYO - Japan is ready to respond "resolutely" to volatile yen movements, Finance Minister Shunichi Suzuki warned Monday, but the currency weakened to breach the key 145 mark versus the U.S. dollar, a level unseen since the country's market intervention in late September.
Japan's record 2.84 trillion yen ($19 billion) intervention to support the yen on Sept. 22 served as "a warning" to speculators who were behind the currency's recent rapid, one-sided movements, Suzuki said, adding the government is watching developments "with a sense of heightened vigilance."
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Japan eyes reopening Kyiv embassy in step with other G-7 nations
TOKYO - Japan is planning to reopen its embassy in Kyiv as early as by the end of October, more than seven months after a temporary closure following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February, diplomatic sources said Monday.
As other Group of Seven industrialized countries have already resumed diplomatic operations in Ukraine, Japan is set to finalize the decision in light of the improved security situation in the Ukrainian capital, according to the sources.
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Sweden's Paabo wins medicine Nobel for discoveries on human evolution
STOCKHOLM - Swedish researcher Svante Paabo won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Monday for his discoveries concerning the genomes of extinct hominins and human evolution.
Paabo, director at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, achieved a "seemingly impossible" feat when he sequenced the genome of the Neanderthal, an extinct relative of present-day humans, the Nobel Assembly at the Karolinska Institute said in a statement.
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China protests Japan vessels' evacuation near Taiwan during typhoon
TOKYO - China expressed "strong concerns" and lodged an unusual protest with Japan over its patrol vessels remaining in international waters in the Taiwan Strait in early September to avoid a typhoon, a source knowledgeable about the matter said Monday.
China told Japan that the coast guard patrol vessels "threatened China's security," the source said, adding it is believed to be the first protest of its kind from Beijing.
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Japan's Airdo, Solaseed Air merge as travel demand hit by pandemic
TOKYO - Japanese regional airlines Airdo Co. and Solaseed Air Inc. merged their operations Monday to cut costs and effectively utilize resources amid a slump in travel demand caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
Airdo, headquartered in Sapporo on the northernmost main island of Hokkaido, and Solaseed Air, based in Miyazaki on the southwestern island of Kyushu, will retain their names and current routes under a new holding company, RegionalPlus Wings Corp.
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Japan, S. Korea join U.S.-Philippines defense drill
MANILA - Japan and South Korea participated as "observers" in this year's military exercise between the United States and the Philippines that started Monday for an 11-day run.
The drill was taking place with simmering tensions between the Philippines and China in the South China Sea, between the United States and China over Taiwan, and North Korea's test firings of ballistic missiles.
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Japan emperor to undergo prostate exam as tumor marker level rises
TOKYO - Emperor Naruhito will undergo a prostate examination after seeing a rise in the level of a tumor marker, the Imperial Household Agency said Monday.
The 62-year-old is expected to take an MRI scan in early November, the agency said.
