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    Once an abductee, always an abductee

    Ooh. This I hadn’t heard about the reunion of Hitomi Soga and Charles Jenkins:

    Jenkins told them that he had been set to take Soga to North Korea if they had met in Beijing, according to Japanese sources.

    North Korea authorities had promised a car with a driver and increased food rations if he managed to take Soga to Pyongyang, the sources said.

    But Jenkins didn’t reveal how he planned to take Soga to Pyongyang.

    Meanwhile, Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroyuki Hosoya said on Tuesday that Jenkins had agreed to meet with a U.S. defense counsel to discuss a possible court martial to settle changes against him.

    That Jenkins was prepared for court martial, as conveyed to a relative who visited Japan last week, was on the news yesterday. What hadn’t been confirmed that was Soga’s instincts had been right about the meeting in Beijing. Good call. (And remind me again why a country that has to ration food is superior to anything?)

    ***

    And speaking of betrayals, yesterday, the Tokyo district court ordered a suspension of merger talks between Mitsubishi-Tokyo Financial Group and the UFJ Group (Japanese, English). The merger would involve reneging on an agreement between UFJ and Sumitomo Trust and Banking (why not get all the behemoth financial institutions to join in the fun while we’re at it, huh?) for Sumitomo to buy UFJ’s trust bank. Sumitomo, justifiably unhappy, is suing.

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