World News
GCAP: Japan, UK, Italy to develop a new generation fighter
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Steph Deschamps / December 9, 2022
Japan will collaborate with the United Kingdom and Italy to develop a next-generation fighter jet by 2035, the three countries announced Friday.
Tokyo, London and Rome will launch “an ambitious effort to develop a next-generation combat aircraft” under a program called GCAP (Global Combat Air Programme), the governments said.
The collaboration, which will build on research already launched by the three partners in advanced air combat technologies such as unmanned aircraft, marks Japan’s first association with European partners to design a combat aircraft.
Details on the cost of the project have not yet been finalized, according to a Japanese defense ministry official, who said production is expected to begin around 2030 or 2031 in order to deploy a prototype by 2035.
When you look at other countries, the United States has the F-35 and Europe has the Eurofighter. We will of course aim to create fighter aircraft that exceed the capabilities of these models,” added the official.
Japan’s Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Britain’s BAE Systems and Italy’s Leonardo are expected to be at the center of the project, according to information from the Japanese business daily Nikkei.
“We are determined to defend the free, open and rules-based international order, which is more important than ever at a time when these principles are being challenged and threats and aggression are increasing,” the three countries said in a statement.
Since it is crucial to defend our democracy, economy and security and to protect regional stability, we need strong defence and security partnerships, underpinned and reinforced by a credible deterrent,” they added.
Japan, whose defense strategy is heavily dependent on its U.S. ally, is seeking to drastically increase its defense capabilities to address the growing threats it feels on its borders, from North Korea to China to Russia after the invasion of Ukraine.
Tokyo announced this week that it plans to increase its military spending by 56% over the period 2023-2027, compared to the previous five fiscal years, and to raise its defense budget to 2% of the national GDP by 2027, compared to a maximum of 1% until now.
Such a goal is controversial in this country, which has had a pacifist constitution since 1947 and which greatly limits the means and missions of its “Self-Defence Forces” (the name of its army).
Japan, the United Kingdom and Italy say they have designed the GCAP program as a basis for cooperation with other countries, emphasizing in their statement its “future interoperability with the United States, Nato and our partners across Europe, the Indo-Pacific and globally.
“The United States supports Japan’s security and defense cooperation with like-minded allies and partners … in the development of its next fighter aircraft,” said a joint statement from the U.S. Department of Defense and the Japanese Ministry of Defense.
The two countries are discussing “autonomous systems” that could be complementary to the Japanese fighter project and have agreed to “begin concrete cooperation in the coming year”, allowing “joint responses to future threats” in the Asia-Pacific region, the statement added.
The future fighter is seen as a successor to the Japanese Mitsubishi F-2, designed with the American Lockheed Martin and put into service in 2000.
Its development should incorporate the advances of the Tempest fighter project, led by the United Kingdom, and a pre-prototype of which is announced “within the next five years”.
An agreement has also been signed in recent weeks between France’s Dassault and Europe’s Airbus to relaunch the costly and complex SCAF European fighter jet project, launched in 2017 and supposed to replace France’s Rafale and Germany’s and Spain’s Eurofighter jets by 2040.
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Sylvie Claire / September 23, 2023
At least 25 people, including two children, died when a bus crashed into a ravine in the Andean region of Huancavelica, in southern Peru, the authorities announced in a revised death toll on Monday evening.
An initial police report put the death toll at 20, with a further 35 injured. A statement from the Ministry of Health later that morning put the death toll at 24. Finally, at the end of the day on Monday, the death toll stood at “25 dead and 34 wounded”, according to the Ministry of Defense.
The accident occurred on Sunday night, when the bus carrying over 50 passengers from Huanta in Ayacucho to Huancayo in the Junin region ran off the road.
Images show the damaged bus lying on its side near a river below the ravine, debris and personal belongings strewn all around.
Peruvian President Dina Boluarte expressed her “condolences to the families” from New York, where she will be attending the 78th General Assembly of the United Nations. The Peruvian Episcopal Conference, for its part, urged the government to “carry out a serious investigation” to prevent such accidents from happening again.
On August 13, another accident in the same region left 13 people dead and 5 seriously injured.
Road accidents are frequent in Peru, mainly due to speeding and poor road maintenance, especially in mountainous areas.
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Sylvie Claire / September 17, 2023
In Japan, the number of people aged 100 has reached a record level: the world’s third-largest economy now has 92,139 people aged 100 or over. That’s 1,613 more than a year ago, reported the Ministry of Health in Tokyo on Friday.
For over half a century, the number of people aged 100 has been rising every year. Due to a low birth rate and almost non-existent immigration, no other industrial state is aging as fast as this East Asian country.
Japan’s population is also shrinking at a record pace. Last year, the number of Japanese fell by 801,000, the biggest drop since comparable data have been recorded. There are now 122.4 million.
When the Japanese Ministry of Health began compiling statistics in 1963, there were 153 centenarians. Twenty-five years later, there were over 10,000. According to the latest figures, around 88% of centenarians are women. Japan has the longest life expectancy in the world. Life expectancy for women is around 87 years, and 81 for men.
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Steph Deschamps / September 17, 2023
The death toll from the earthquake in Morocco has risen to 2,946, the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior announced on Wednesday evening. A further 5,674 people were injured.
The previous death toll was 2,901. The death toll is expected to rise further. Hopes of finding survivors are now very slim. Rescue workers have not yet been able to reach all the villages affected in the Atlas Mountains.
A magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck the country on Friday night. The epicenter was located some 80 kilometers southwest of Marrakech. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 300,000 people in and around Marrakech were affected by the disaster.
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