Japan

South Korean's Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) said it detected the launch from the Sunan area in Pyongyang at 7.10 a.m., and the missile, fired at a lofted angle, flew some 1,000 km before hitting the waters, reports Yonhap NewsAgency. A month earlier, the North test-fired a Hwasong-15 intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).

According to the bill aimed to be passed during the current parliamentary session, the age of sexual consent in Japan will be raised from 13 to 16, reports Xinhua news agency. Sex with children under the age of 16 will be criminalised by raising the legal age of consent, with Japan having long been under pressure from child consultation centres here which deal with abuse, as well as international human rights organisations, for the legal age of consent to be raised.

Seven minutes after taking off from Tanegashima Space Center in Japan on Monday, H3 rocket's velocity fell and second stage ignition could not be confirmed, Space.com reported. Mission controllers then issued a destruct command to the rocket. "A destruct command has been transmitted to the launch vehicle, because there was no possibility of achieving the mission," read a subtitle on Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) livestream.

Kishida said Japan will stand by an apology that was issued by then Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama in a statement in 1995, on the 50th anniversary of Japan's surrender in World War II, reports Xinhua news agency. The statement has been mentioned by successive Japanese cabinets as the government's basic stance, although the terminology, particularly with reference.

Japan did not issue such a statement and the Ministry has communicated the apparent error to the US State Department, said the Ministry on Wednesday. According to the Ministry, the US State Department mistakenly sent a G7 foreign ministers' statement, presumably from October 2022, to the press Multiple local media, including Kyodo News, retracted articles based.

"We have just confirmed this today," Kristersson told Swedish public television broadcaster SVT on Wednesday, without specifying the date for such talks. Turkey has postponed a trilateral meeting with Sweden and Finland on their NATO bids slated for February following the burning of a copy of the Quran in Stockholm, Xinhua news agency reported.

South Korean First Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun-dong said the sides will continue to hold discussions but that they have yet to reach any conclusion, Yonhap News Agency reported. "We are still trying to find common ground," he told reporters when asked about his bilateral meeting with Japanese Vice Foreign Minister Takeo Mori on Monday.

The US diplomat also insisted that trilateral cooperation among the US and its two allies is only getting stronger, Yonhap news agency reported. "The DPRK continued to threaten the ROK, Japan and its neighbors and the world with the launch of an unprecedented number of ballistic missiles last year," Sherman said, referring to North Korea by its official name, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Yamagami, 42, is believed to have test-fired a weapon at a facility linked to the religious group Unification Church in the western city of Nara on July 7 last year, a day before the fatal shooting, in addition to making handguns and gunpowder without authorization, according to the Nara prefectural police, Xinhua news agency reported.

It is the first time since it was delivered in 2021 that the system is deployed for a live operation in Sweden, Xinhua news agency quoted the Aftonbladet newspaper as saying in a report on Monday. Therese Fagerstedt, head of press at the Swedish Armed Forces, told the newspaper that the operation in Gothenburg was not a training exercise.