Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s ruling party wants to revise the nation’s constitution by late 2018 to remove constraints on his defense strategy, a key party lawmaker said, an ambitious target since the charter has not been changed since Americans drafted it after World War II.
Abe has already stretched the post-war pacifist constitution with a dramatic shift in security policy that ends a ban on Japan’s military fighting overseas.
That shift, outlined in a Cabinet resolution in July last year and to be enacted in the coming months, will be reflected in new US-Japan defense cooperation guidelines that were scheduled to be unveiled in New York yesterday during Abe’s visit to the US.
“The Cabinet resolution and legislation being crafted now have gone right up to the limits of what is possible under the constitution as it is now,” said Hajime Funada, head of a Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) panel on constitutional revision.
“If we want to have more flexibility, it is necessary to revise Article 9,” he said in a recent interview.
The constitution’s war-renouncing Article 9, if read literally, bans the maintenance of armed forces. Successive governments have interpreted it to allow a military for “self-defense.”
A revision would be seen as a huge symbolic victory for the LDP, which has ruled for most of the past six decades, but not been able to change a word of the charter.
Funada said the next three years were a window of opportunity to do the revision, since no lower house election need be held until late 2018 and Abe would likely win another three-year term as LDP leader in a September party poll.
“During that period if possible, we want to revise the constitution including Article 9,” he said.
A proposed change by the LDP would make clear Japan has the right to maintain a military and deploy it at home and abroad.
Republican US lawmakers on Friday criticized US President Joe Biden’s administration after sanctioned Chinese telecoms equipment giant Huawei unveiled a laptop this week powered by an Intel artificial intelligence (AI) chip. The US placed Huawei on a trade restriction list in 2019 for contravening Iran sanctions, part of a broader effort to hobble Beijing’s technological advances. Placement on the list means the company’s suppliers have to seek a special, difficult-to-obtain license before shipping to it. One such license, issued by then-US president Donald Trump’s administration, has allowed Intel to ship central processors to Huawei for use in laptops since 2020. China hardliners
A top Vietnamese property tycoon was on Thursday sentenced to death in one of the biggest corruption cases in history, with an estimated US$27 billion in damages. A panel of three hand-picked jurors and two judges rejected all defense arguments by Truong My Lan, chair of major developer Van Thinh Phat, who was found guilty of swindling cash from Saigon Commercial Bank (SCB) over a decade. “The defendant’s actions ... eroded people’s trust in the leadership of the [Communist] Party and state,” read the verdict at the trial in Ho Chi Minh City. After the five-week trial, 85 others were also sentenced on
‘DELUSIONAL’: Targeting the families of Hamas’ leaders would not push the group to change its position or to give up its demands for Palestinians, Ismail Haniyeh said Israeli aircraft on Wednesday killed three sons of Hamas’ top political leader in the Gaza Strip, striking high-stakes targets at a time when Israel is holding delicate ceasefire negotiations with the militant group. Hamas said four of the leader’s grandchildren were also killed. Ismail Haniyeh’s sons are among the highest-profile figures to be killed in the war so far. Israel said they were Hamas operatives, and Haniyeh accused Israel of acting in “the spirit of revenge and murder.” The deaths threatened to strain the internationally mediated ceasefire talks, which appeared to gain steam in recent days even as the sides remain far
Conjoined twins Lori and George Schappell, who pursued separate careers, interests and relationships during lives that defied medical expectations, died this month in Pennsylvania, funeral home officials said. They were 62. The twins, listed by Guinness World Records as the oldest living conjoined twins, died on April 7 at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, obituaries posted by Leibensperger Funeral Homes of Hamburg said. The cause of death was not detailed. “When we were born, the doctors didn’t think we’d make 30, but we proved them wrong,” Lori said in an interview when they turned 50, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported. The