NEW YORK —
Mariah Carey has ushered in 2017 with a botched performance on “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest” on ABC.
The singer appeared to have technical difficulties during her live performance Saturday night in Times Square. She even stopped singing her song “Emotions,” paced the stage and told the audience to finish the lyrics for her.
She told the crowd, “I’m trying to be a good sport here.”
Carey headlined the festivities in Times Square, where about a million revelers jammed in to greet 2017.
After the song finished, Carey looked exasperated.
She started saying, “That was,” then she paused and finally finished by saying, “amazing.”
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© Source: https://www.japantoday.com/category/entertainment/view/mariah-carey-bungles-her-new-years-eve-show-stops-singing
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FUKUSHIMA —
A doctor who continued to provide medical care to people in an evacuation area after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster is believed to have died in a fire at his home, police said Saturday.
The body of a man was found after a fire on Friday at the wooden house of Hideo Takano, 81, director of Takano Hospital in Hirono, Fukushima Prefecture.
Hirono, located some 20 to 30 kilometers from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, was subject to an evacuation advisory after three reactors melted down in the days after a devastating earthquake and tsunami in March 2011.
Many residents of Hirono heeded the evacuation advisory, but Takano remained and continued to run his hospital because some patients were too ill and frail to be moved. The advisory was lifted by the government in September 2011.
Akihiko Ozaki, 31, a doctor at Minamisoma Municipal General Hospital in the city of Minamisoma, Fukushima Prefecture, said his hospital plans to provide help to Takano Hospital which currently has 102 inpatients.
“Despite his age, Dr. Takano had supported community healthcare all by himself,” said Ozaki, an acquaintance of Takano, who was the only fulltime staff doctor at his hospital.
© KYODO

© Source: https://www.japantoday.com/category/national/view/doctor-who-labored-on-after-nuclear-disaster-apparently-dies-in-fire
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Fuji Xerox, the biggest supplier of multifunction office printers and document management systems in Asia Pacific, plans to launch its “cloud” business in mainland China’s major cities later this year, as the company starts to sharpen its focus on more sophisticated products and services in the world’s second-largest economy. The Tokyo-based company is also looking to enter the mainland’s fast-growing market for 3D printers, according to Fuji Xerox executive vice-president Masataka Jo, who is also president of the firm’s Greater China operations. “What we are trying to do is create a sustainable business model in China by enhancing our solutions development capability there,” Jo said in an interview. “So our strategy will increasingly focus on the higher end of the market.” In November, Hong Kong became one of the first markets outside of Japan where Fuji Xerox launched its new cloud services package known as “Smart Work Gateway”. Cloud services enable companies to buy, lease or sell software and other digital resources online, just like electricity from a power grid. These operations are hosted and managed in so-called data centres. The Fuji Xerox package combines a new “smart” multifunction device with technical support, apps-based automated document workflow and XpressGateway, an online hub that allows users to upload content to multiple cloud storage services – including Box, Google Drive and Dropbox – and print directly from those sites. “Hong Kong is one of the most profitable markets for Fuji Xerox as more than 50 per cent of its revenue now come from services,” Jo said. He pointed out that introducing Fuji Xerox cloud services on the mainland may require the firm to engage with a local third-party service provider, such as Alibaba Cloud, China Telecom or Neusoft Corp. Alibaba Cloud is a subsidiary of New York-listed Alibaba Group, which owns the. According to a Forrester Research report, the largest public cloud platforms on the mainland as of the fourth quarter of 2016 were Alibaba Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Microsoft. “As a foreign company, we may need a data centre located in China to provide local cloud services,” Jo said. “Hopefully, we can start in the second half of 2017.” He indicated that initial Fuji Xerox cloud operations on the mainland are currently targeted at Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. “The majority of our sophisticated business solutions are in demand at those major cities,” he said. Other cities with rising demand for such solutions are Chengdu, Hangzhou and Chongqing, he added. Fuji Xerox, a joint venture 75 per cent owned by Fujifilm Holdings and 25 per cent by United States-based Xerox Corp, has invested an estimated US$150 million in China since it started doing business in Shanghai in 1987. As Fujifilm’s documents solutions subsidiary, Fuji Xerox contributed 47 per cent of its parent’s ¥2.49 trillion (HK$165.98 billion) revenue in its fiscal year ended March 31. The company’s Greater China operations cover the mainland and Hong Kong, where it has almost 15,000 total staff. Sales in the year to March reached ¥100 billion. Manufacturing operations in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Suzhou provide 80 per cent of all products shipped by Fuji Xerox worldwide. It also has a software development centre in Shanghai, and currently has direct sales and services in more than 30 cities. “China is 26 times bigger than Japan, so we also have to develop an elaborate channel strategy for this market,” Jo said. He said the next challenge for Fuji Xerox would be entering the country’s nascent 3D printer segment, which has fuelled increased design prototyping and printing of customised products. Research firm IDC said the mainland was already the fastest-growing market for 3D printers, with total shipments forecast to reach 440,000 units by 2020 from about 77,000 in 2015. In 2015 the Chinese government identified 3D printing as a major aspect of the country’s “Made in China 2025” industrial transformation plan, according to IDC. However, existing 3D printing data formats have certain limitations, such as being unable to produce objects with a complicated internal structure with multiple materials. That has prompted Fuji Xerox and researchers at Keio University in Japan to jointly formulate a new printing data format that can retain an object’s multiple 3D information, including colours, materials and internal structures. The format’s specification was released online in July. Jo said Fuji Xerox intends to forge strategic partnerships to enter the 3D printer segment, in which US firms control most of the intellectual property. “I don’t think we can do everything ourselves initially,” he said. While its cloud services and 3D printer initiatives are pushed forward, Fuji Xerox expects to further grow its existing printer business on the mainland. In terms of A3 multifunction office printers, the company has been the market leader in China in recent years. “We had an overall market share of 19 per cent in 2015, and expect to record more than 20 per cent share in 2016,” said Jo, citing IDC data and the company’s own estimates. He estimated that more than seven million units of office printers and multifunction devices, large-format production systems, and low-end desktop printers were sold on the mainland in 2015. HP, meanwhile, had an estimated market share of nearly 50 per cent in China’s vast, but highly price-sensitive consumer desktop printer segment. “One of the unique features of the printer industry in China is that there is huge demand in the very low end of the market,” Jo said. “But I don’t think all vendors are making money there.” “In the next five years, we expect other vendors to gradually move away from the very low end of the market,” he added. During the discount-friendly Singles’ Day online shopping festival in China, IDC estimated that HP sold 136,054 consumer desktop printers through Alibaba’s Tmall, JD.com and other online retail sites to account for more than 57 per cent of printer sales on November 11. Fuji Xerox sold 12,508 consumer desktop printers on the same day, behind Canon’s 51,598 units and Epson’s 23,275.

© Source: http://www.scmp.com/tech/china-tech/article/2058546/fuji-xerox-eyes-cloud-3d-printer-expansion-initiatives-china
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© Source: http://www.eastasiaforum.org/2017/01/01/what-australia-needs-to-do-after-trump/
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The P-3CK four-engine anti-submarine and maritime surveillance plane dropped three Harpoon missiles, a torpedo, and depth charges into the sea, Yonhap news agency reported, citing the South Korean military.
“One of the plane’s crew mistakenly touched the emergency weapons release switch at around 6:10am,” an official source was cited as saying.
The weapons were not armed, and no civilians were affected by accident. “There was one fishing boat in the area but it sustained no damage,” he said.
The weapons fell into the water about 50 kilometers (31 miles) to the east of Yangyang, prompting a mine sweeper and salvage ship to be sent to the area.
The mishap comes on the same day as a New Year’s statement from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s announced that Pyongyang is developing prohibited intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs).
Tensions have been running high in the region recently, with the North announcing in January that it is now capable of launching a nuclear attack. Meanwhile, South Korea and the US have disclosed that they intend to install a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile system in South Korea, which is to be operational in 2017.

© Source: https://www.rt.com/news/372437-south-korea-drops-missiles/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=RSS
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After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at least a start. We should note, moreover, that it’s a start we owe to the president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump’s outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses. Comparative anonymities (looking down at my shoes, now) could try terrorism cases and fill shelves with books and pamphlets and columns on the ideology behind the jihad from now until the end of time. But no matter how many terrorist attacks Americans endured, the public examination of the enemy was not going to happen unless a credible candidate for the world’s most important job dramatically shifted the parameters of acceptable discourse.
What we Cassandras have really been trying to highlight is a simple fact, as patent as it was unremarkable from the time of Sun Tsu until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: To defeat the enemy, you must know the enemy — who he is, what motivates him, what he is trying to achieve. Being willing to name the enemy is a start. But it is just a start — the beginning, not the end, of understanding.
In his major campaign speech on the subject, Trump asserted that the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism.” Terrorism, surely, is the business end of the spear, but “radical Islamic terrorism” is an incomplete portrait. Dangerously incomplete? That depends on whether the term (a) is Trump’s shorthand for a threat he realizes is significantly broader than terrorism, or (b) reflects his actual — and thus insufficient — grasp of the challenge.
Trump intimated some understanding of this, too. He vowed to “speak out against the oppression of women, gays, and people of different faith [i.e., non-Muslims].” He promised, in addition, to work with “all moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East.” The objects of radical Islamic oppression are targeted because of ideological tenets that call for dominion by sharia, Islam’s ancient totalitarian law. It is those tenets that reformers are trying to reform.
If ISIS and al-Qaeda disappeared tomorrow, other jihadist networks would take their places. It will be that way until sharia supremacism is discredited and marginalized.
That is a tall order, not to be underestimated. The audience in which the ideology must be discredited is not Western; it does not share our value system — our sense of what is credible and meritorious. Plus, the sharia that our enemies strive to implement (i.e., “jihad in Allah’s way”) is undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. It will not be easy — it may not be possible — to discredit a literalist construction of Islam that has been backed by revered scholars for 14 centuries.
There is, furthermore, an on-the-ground reality of much greater moment than theological infighting: A large percentage of the world’s approximately 1.6 billion Muslims reject sharia supremacism. Many of them provide us with essential help in fighting the enemy. To condemn Islam, rather than those who seek to impose Islam’s ruling system on us, can only alienate our allies. They are allies we need in an ideological conflict.
The sensible strategy, therefore, calls for supporting the Islamic reformers President-elect Trump says he wants to befriend. That would be an epic improvement over outreach to Islamists, whom our government has inanely courted and empowered for a quarter-century. To the extent we can (and that may be limited), we should support the reinterpretation of what Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi courageously acknowledged as “the corpus of texts and ideas that we [Muslims] have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible” even though they are “antagonizing the entire world.”
Sisi, it is worth noting, is a devout Muslim who knows a lot more about Islam than Barack Obama and John Kerry do. In any event, it’s better to confront with open eyes the scripturally rooted ideological foundation of radical Islam. As we’ve seen over the last three presidential administrations (or the last six, if you want to go back to Carter and Khomeini’s revolution), pretending that the ideology does not exist, or that it represents a “false Islam,” is fantasy. As a national-security strategy, fantasy is a prescription for failure.
It has been the Obama prescription, right up to the end.
While candidate Trump was demanding that the enemy be named, and me-too Hillary was thus goaded into the occasional mention of “jihadists,” Obama tried to defend his refusal to invoke radical Islam. The defense was classic Obama. Part One was flat wrong: “There’s no religious rationale ,” he maintained, that would justify” the “barbarism” in which terrorists engage — something that could only be right if we ignore scripture and adopt Obama’s eccentric notion of “religious rationale.” Part Two drew on Obama’s bottomless supply of straw men: “ Using the phrase ‘radical Islam ,’” he lectured, will not make the terrorist threat “go away” — as if anyone had claimed it would.
The point, of course, is not that there is talismanic power in uttering an enemy’s identity. It is to convey, to the enemy and to an anxious American public, that our leader comprehends who the enemy is, what the enemy’s objectives are, and what drives the enemy to achieve them.
Obviously, Obama is too smart not to know this. After eight infuriating years, I am beyond trying to fathom whether his intentional gibberish masks some misguided but well-meaning strategy, some dogma to which he is hopelessly beholden, or something more sinister. The imperative now is to address the mess he is leaving behind, not unwind how and why he came to make it.
What does this have to do with our enemy’s ideology? Everything.
Further, radical Islam regards the presence of a sovereign Jewish state in Islamic territory as an intolerable affront. Again, the reason is doctrinal. Do not take my word for it; have a look at the 1988 Hamas Charter (“The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement”). Article 7, in particular, includes this statement by the prophet Muhammad:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, “O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” . . . (Related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
Understand: Al-Bukhari and Muslim are authoritative collections of hadith. These memorializations of the prophet’s sayings and deeds have scriptural status in Islam. Hamas is not lying — this story of an end-of-times annihilation of Jews is related, repeatedly, in Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., here .) And please spare me the twaddle about how there are competing interpretations that discount or “contextualize” these hadith. It doesn’t matter which, if any, interpretation represents the “true Islam” (if there is one). What matters for purposes of our security is that millions of Muslims, including our enemies, believe these hadith mean what they say — unalterable, for all time.
Even after all the mass-murder attacks we have endured over the last few decades, and for all their claptrap about respecting Islam as “one of the world’s great religions,” transnational progressives cannot bring themselves to accept that something as passé as religious doctrine could dictate 21st-century conflicts. So, they tell themselves, the Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simply about territorial boundaries and refugee rights. It could be settled if Israel, which they reckon would never have been established but for a regrettable bout of post-Holocaust remorse, would just make a few concessions regarding land it was never ceded in the first place (conveniently overlooking that East Jerusalem and the West Bank are disputed territories, and were not “Palestinian” when Israel took them in the 1967 war of Arab aggression).
It is not just fantasy but willfully blind idiocy. No one who took a few minutes to understand the ideology of radical Islam would contemplate for a moment a resolution such as the one Obama just choreographed.
We are not merely in a shooting war with jihadists. We are in an ideological war with sharia supremacists. Mass murder is not their sole tactic; they attack at the negotiating table, in the councils of government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom — at every political and cultural pressure point. To defeat jihadists, it is necessary to discredit the ideology that catalyzes them. You don’t discredit an ideology by ignoring its existence, denying its power, and accommodating it at every turn.
President Obama never got this. Will President Trump?
In his campaign, Trump made a welcome start by naming the enemy. Now it is time to know the enemy — such that it is clear to the enemy that we understand his objectives and his motivation, and that we will deny him because our own principles require it.
That would tell radical Islam that America rejects its objectives as well as its tactics, that we will fight its ideology as well as its terrorism. This is not just about restoring our reputation as a dependable ally. Our security depends on it.

© Source: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/443440/donald-trump-radical-islam-israel-palestinian-conflict-test-case-new-administration
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TOKYO — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un hinted Sunday that Pyongyang may ring in the new year with another bang — the test-launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile.
In his annual New Year’s address, Kim said that after testing what the North claims was its first hydrogen bomb last year, preparations for launching an intercontinental ballistic missile have “reached the final stage”
Kim did not explicitly say an ICBM test, which if successful would be a big step forward for the North, was imminent. But he has a birthday coming up on Jan. 8 , and last year Pyongyang conducted a nuclear test on Jan. 6 .
Kim threatened in the address to boost his country’s military capabilities further unless the U. S. ends war games with rival South Korea. But he also said efforts must be made to defuse the possibility of another Korean war and stressed the importance of building the economy under a five-year plan announced in May.
“The political and military position of socialism should be further cemented as an invincible fortress,” Kim said, according to an outline of the speech carried by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency. “We should resolutely smash the enemies’ despicable and vicious moves to dampen the pure and ardent desire of the people for the party and estrange the people from it.”
The address was shown on television mixing video with Kim speaking and stretches of audio only, as still photos were broadcast. It was less than 30 minutes long.
South Korea’s Unification Ministry said in a statement that it “strongly condemns” Kim’s threat to proceed with a test launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile and strengthen North Korea’s nuclear-strike capabilities. It said that the international community will not tolerate North Korean efforts to develop nuclear weapons, and that the North will only face tougher sanctions and pressure if it continues to go down that path.
Under Kim, who rose to power following his father’s death in 2011, North Korea has seen steady progress in its nuclear and missile programs, including two nuclear tests in 2016. It recently claimed a series of technical breakthroughs in its goal of developing a long-range nuclear missile capable of reaching the continental United States.
U. N. resolutions call for an end to North Korea’s nuclear and missile tests. Kim appears uninterested in complying.
The year ahead could be a tumultuous one in north Asia, with Donald Trump set to become the new U. S. president on Jan. 20 , and South Korea’s politics in disarray over a scandal that brought the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye.
Kim indicated there will be no change in the North’s nuclear policy unless Washington makes a big, conciliatory first move, which, even with the advent of Trump, would seem unlikely.
Trump has somewhat offhandedly suggested he would be willing to meet with Kim — but not in North Korea — and has at the same time indicated that he wants China to exert significantly more control over Pyongyang to get it to abandon its nuclear program.
Demands from Pyongyang for the U. S. to stop its joint military exercises with the South and enter into negotiations to sign a peace treaty formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War have fallen on deaf ears in Washington for years amid an atmosphere of distrust and deepening hostility.
Kim is in his early 30s and is now in his fifth year as the North’s leader.
His New Year addresses, and a marathon speech at the May ruling party congress, are a contrast with his enigmatic father, Kim Jong Il, who rarely spoke in public. But he has yet to meet a foreign head of state or travel outside of North Korea since assuming power, and remains one the world’s most mysterious national leaders.

© Source: https://newsinfo.inquirer.net/858505/north-korea-leader-hints-of-long-range-missile-test-launch
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