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A U.S. F/A-18 fighter jet flew over an elementary school in Miyoshi, Hiroshima Prefecture, at a dangerous and illegally low altitude in December, the Japanese Communist Party's local chapter said. According to an investigation by the party's Hiroshima prefectural committee, the aircraft flew over the school at an altitude of about 200 meters around 1:20 p.m. Dec. 20, in violation of the Aviation Law, which sets the minimum level at 300 meters. The committee said it has asked the Hiroshima Prefectural Government to urge the U.S. military to stop low-altitude flights, adding the flyby also violated a Japan-U.S. agreement that calls on American forces to show consideration over flight training around schools and hospitals. (Japan Times)

Police recaptured a Chinese fugitive Friday, two days after he escaped from Hiroshima Prison dressed only in his underwear. Li Guolin, 40, fled Wednesday by scaling a 5-meter prison fence that was undergoing repair work. The National Police Agency had placed Li on a special wanted list. "We will review (the prison's management system) to make sure this doesn't happen again," Chief Cabinet Secretary Osamu Fujimura told a news conference soon after Li was apprehended. He has served about 3.5 years in Hiroshima Prison after his conviction for attempted murder and theft. The police recaptured Li after an undercover officer spotted him crossing a street near an elementary school in Nishi Ward, Hiroshima, only 2 km from the prison. (Japan Times)

The daring jailbreak of a dangerous criminal wearing only his prison-issued underwear has sparked an intense manhunt in a southern Japanese city and prompted schools to advise children to travel in supervised groups until he is caught. Nearly 800 police officers have been assigned to the hunt for the convict, Li Guolin, a Chinese national who had been jailed for shooting at an officer and stealing a squad car in 2005, according to the Hiroshima Prefectural Police. Officers on Thursday scoured train stations, bus depots and parks across Hiroshima city. Police also distributed the convict's mugshot door-to-door and posted his description on the Internet. (AP)

The counter on a "peace clock" monument in the city of Hiroshima showing the number of days since the world's last nuclear test has been reset following revelations last week that the U.S. conducted two tests using plutonium last year to examine the capabilities of its nuclear arsenal. On Tuesday, in the 15th reset since the clock was installed at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in August 2001, the digital number was changed to 55 from 285, indicating the number of days since Nov. 16, when the United States conducted its latest nuclear weapons capability test. The clock was last reset on May 24, 2011, following similar U.S. tests with the use of plutonium to examine the effectiveness of its nuclear weapons. (Japan Times)

A 21-year-old man jumped to his death Monday in an apparent suicide at a sailing school in Mihama, Aichi Prefecture, that is known for its strict education program for troubled young people, police said. The man jumped from the roof of a three-story dormitory at Totsuka Yacht School around 7:30 a.m., leaving a note on the roof terrace that read: "It's painful for me to live. I want to die," police said. The Hiroshima Prefecture native, who joined the school in December 2010, climbed onto the roof while taking out garbage with another student, the police said. (Japan Times)

The cenotaph for atomic bomb victims at Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park was found defaced with what appears to be golden paint in the early hours of Wednesday, police said. Paint was sprayed over part of the cenotaph's inscription, which reads, "Let all souls here rest in peace, for we shall not repeat the evil," the police said. A security guard rushed to the cenotaph shortly before 1 a.m. after someone entered the site, setting off an alarm, police said. According to a local security company, passersby saw a man with gray hair approach the cenotaph and use something resembling a spray can. (Japan Times)

A university research team is asking the government to take steps to ensure student safety, after finding that 225 schools are likely to lie on active faults, with 780 other schools located close to such rifts. Based on the results, the team has started further investigations using aerial photographs and other means to pinpoint locations of all schools nationwide and active faults. "We hope the heads of schools located on active faults and administrative officials in charge will consider banning use of school buildings on such rifts," said Takashi Nakata, professor emeritus of geography at Hiroshima University, who led the study, along with Takashi Kumamoto, associate professor of geographic information at Okayama University. (Asahi)

Okunoshima, a small island floating in the Inland Sea between Hiroshima and Shikoku, used to be a top-secret military site manufacturing poison gas. Not exactly the kind of place you'd think to spend an idyllic afternoon. Of course, that was before the rabbits took over. In 1971, a group of schoolchildren released eight rabbits on the island. The rabbits did what rabbits do best and now the 700-square-meter island is home to more than 300 of their floppy-eared descendants, earning it the nickname Usagi Shima, or Rabbit Island. While the Okunoshima museum chronicling Japan's use of poison gas has been drawing school groups for decades, the island has more recently joined the ranks of cat cafes and dog-rental shops as a destination for Japan's pet-less cravers of cute. (CNN)

Police in Hiroshima said Friday they are searching for a man who assaulted a boy with an umbrella on Thursday afternoon. According to police, the victim, a 14-year-old schoolboy, was walking home with a friend in Aki Ward at around 5:30 p.m., when a man standing nearby suddenly poked him in the face with an umbrella. TV Asahi reported that the boy was struck underneath the right eye with enough force to draw blood. The boy was taken to hospital and treated for a minor contusion. Doctors say his injury is not serious. (Japan Today)

Eight Ferraris, a Lamborghini and three Mercedes sports cars were among more than a dozen vehicles whose wreckages were left strewn across a rainy expressway in Shimonoseki, south-west Japan. Among those being questioned by police is a 60-year-old self-employed man, from Fukuoka prefecture in southern Kyushu, who may face charges for his role in the crash. The driver, who is thought to have been leading the luxury car convoy on its journey from Kyushu to Hiroshima, is believed to have lost control of his red Ferrari while switching lanes. Speeding has been cited by police as one possible cause of the accident, with convictions for dangerous driving resulting in an accident incurring a prison sentence of up to three months or a fine of up to Y100,000. (telegraph.co.uk)

The cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki sent letters to the U.S. government Friday asking that information on damage caused by atomic bombings be included in its plans to establish national historical parks commemorating the U.S. wartime project that developed the weapons. In a letter sent to U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos, Hiroshima Mayor Kazumi Matsui wrote that "the people of Hiroshima were profoundly alarmed" by the U.S. plan to designate three sites involved in the Manhattan Project as national historical parks. (Japan Times)

The deputy chief of a police station in Iwakuni, Yamaguchi Prefecture, is being questioned over a suspected case of shoplifting, prefectural police said Monday. According to police, the deputy chief is alleged to have been caught shoplifting several food items from a shopping center in Otake, Hiroshima Prefecture, while off-duty on Saturday, TBS reported. A Yamaguchi prefectural police spokesperson was quoted as saying that the incident was regrettable incident and that they will respond appropriately. (Japan Today)

A 45-year-old man has been arrested for stabbing three men, one fatally, at a barbecue restaurant late Sunday in Onomichi, Hiroshima Prefecture. A 19-year-old was confirmed dead at a hospital early Monday. Takashi Kuramoto, who says he is a house painter, is believed to have stabbed the three in the stomach and face with a kitchen knife used at the restaurant after getting into a fight with them. He says he remembers harming one of the men but has denied stabbing all three, the police said. (Japan Times)

A tiny portion of a secret cable released last month by WikiLeaks is just now making its way to the United States. In the Sept. 2009 cable, U.S. Ambassador to Japan John Roos tells the Obama administration that Japan doesn't think it's a good idea for President Obama to visit Hiroshima or to apologize for using an atomic bomb on two Japanese cities during World War II. The cable leaves a lot of questions open, including whether the U.S. was offering an apology and what sort of domestic and international rifts an apology could unveil. The United States has made it policy not to comment on leaked cables. The cable was sent to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in advance of President Obama's visit to the country. (NPR)

A team of Japanese doctors arrived Tuesday in North Korea to examine victims of the 1945 atomic bombings of Japan, a trip that may help improve dismal ties between the countries. Footage from Associated Press Television News in Pyongyang showed the doctors being greeted at the airport by North Korean officials. The doctors from the Hiroshima Prefectural Medical Association are expected to be in North Korea until Saturday. Relations between the two countries are badly frayed. Japan has maintained a tight trade embargo on North Korea since Pyongyang conducted nuclear tests in 2006 and 2009. Japan also demands that Pyongyang return Japanese citizens North Korea is believed to have kidnapped in the past to train its spies. (AP)

Mazda will stop making cars with its signature rotary engines after a 45-year production run that included powering the first and only Japanese car to win the 24-hour Le Mans endurance race. Poor sales and the high costs of meeting modern emissions standards have made rotary engines uneconomical to produce. Mazda Motor Corp. said Friday that the latest edition of the Mazda RX-8 will go on sale Nov. 24, targeting sales of 1,000 vehicles, but will end production in June 2012. The Japanese automaker, based in Hiroshima, introduced its first rotary engine car in 1967 and is the only automaker in the world that makes rotary engine vehicles. Such engines have fewer moving parts and are quieter than comparable piston engines but are more expensive to manufacture and consume more fuel. (Reuters)

A senior official of Japan's Foreign Ministry told the U.S. ambassador in Tokyo it would be premature for U.S. President Barack Obama to visit the atomic-bombed city of Hiroshima during his November 2009 trip to Japan, according to a secret U.S. cable recently released by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks. The cable indicates the Japanese government was then effectively discouraging Obama from visiting Hiroshima despite growing expectations over it following his call for a world free from nuclear weapons in a speech in Prague in April 2009. (Japan Times)

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan's wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets.

Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the 100 cows slaughtered on government order after radiation from the March 11 atomic disaster saturated the area, forcing 160,000 people to move away and leaving some places uninhabitable for two decades or more.

What's emerging in Japan six months since the nuclear meltdown at the Tokyo Electric Power Co. plant is a radioactive zone bigger than that left by the 1945 atomic bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. While nature reclaims the 20 kilometer (12 mile) no-go zone, Fukushima's $3.2 billion-a-year farm industry is being devastated and tourists that hiked the prefecture's mountains and surfed off its beaches have all but vanished. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Japan hoteliers have experienced a hit from the recent quake and tsunami, with major cities witnessing a double-digit drop in average hotel prices for the first six months of the year. Feeling the brunt of natural disasters, Japan's cities Hiroshima and Kyoto witnessed double digit price falls of 38 percent, 33 percent in average rates. Despite experiencing similar impacts, New Zealand's Wellington and Auckland have experienced an adverse effect, welcoming a 15 percent and three percent growth for the same period. According to Hotels.com, Australian hotels also welcomed growth, with the country achieving three times the global average three percent hotel price growth with a nine percent increase over the period. (etravelblackboardasia.com)

The amount of radioactive cesium ejected by the Fukushima reactor meltdowns is about 168 times higher than that emitted in the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, the government's nuclear watchdog said Friday. The Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency provided the estimate at the request of a Diet panel but noted that making a simple comparison between an instantaneous bomb blast and a long-term accidental leak is problematic and could lead to "irrelevant" results. The report said the crippled Fukushima No. 1 plant has released 15,000 terabecquerels of cesium-137, which lingers for decades and can cause cancer, compared with the 89 terabecquerels released by the U.S. atomic bombing of Hiroshima. (Japan Times)

Mazda Motor Corp. has canceled production of its RX-8 rotary engine sports car, citing falling sales and stringent global emissions standards. Production in Hiroshima, Japan, ended in early July and global sales of the car will conclude later this year. The RX-8 and the three generations of the RX-7 that preceded it have long been the foundation the brand's fun-to-drive aura. The car's high-revving 1.3-liter, twin-rotor rotary engine produces 232 hp at 8,500 rpm -- a big punch in a relatively small package. But Mazda sold just 1,134 RX-8s last year, a 49 percent decline from 2009. Sales through July of 2011 were down another 21 percent. (CNET)

Video footage of Tatsuhiko Kodama's impassioned speech before a Diet committee in July went viral online recently, showing the medical expert's shocking revelation that the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant spewed some 30 times more radioactive materials than the fallout from the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Kodama, a professor of systems biology and medicine at the University of Tokyo, used clear-cut terms to get his message across. His ruthless criticism of the government's slow response has been viewed at least 1 million times. "It means a significantly large amount of radioactive material was released compared with the atomic bomb," he told the Diet committee. "What has the Diet been doing as 70,000 people are forced to evacuate and wander outside of their homes?" (Japan Times)

A group of 12 high school students Thursday presented 80,000 signatures calling for the elimination of nuclear weapons to the secretariat of the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva. The group includes four students from the atomic-bombed prefectures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as well as two from Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, which was severely damaged by the March earthquake and tsunami. It is the 14th time that Japanese high school messengers of peace have visited the U.N. office since 1998. The signatures were collected both in and outside Japan. (Japan Times)

Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Saturday took his campaign against nuclear energy in Japan to Hiroshima which 66 years ago became the world's first victim of an atomic bomb. It marks a change of tack in a country which has until now carefully avoided linking its fast growing, and now discredited, nuclear power industry to its trauma as the only country to have been attacked with atomic bombs. Kan, speaking at an anniversary ceremony for victims of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, repeated that the world's worst nuclear crisis in 25 years at Fukushima after a March earthquake convinced him Japan should end its dependence on nuclear power. (Reuters)

The Japanese city of Hiroshima marked the 66th anniversary of the bombing on Saturday, as the nation fights a different kind of disaster from atomic technology - a nuclear plant in a meltdown crisis after being hit by a tsunami. The site of the world's first A-bomb attack observed a moment of silence at 8:15 a.m. Saturday (2315 GMT Friday) - the time the bomb was dropped on Aug. 6, 1945, by the United States in the last stages of World War II. The bomb destroyed most of the city and killed as many as 140,000 people. A second atomic bombing Aug. 9 that year in Nagasaki killed tens of thousands more and prompted the Japanese to surrender. Prime Minister Naoto Kan on Saturday laid a wreath of yellow flowers at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, and reiterated Japan's promise to never repeat the horrors of Hiroshima, whose suffering continues today because of illnesses passed over generations. (Reuters)