[Introduction: In late October, the Japanese government presented its nuclear plans for the next decade. As was widely expected, the strongly pro-nuclear Atomic Energy Commission declared that Japan should plow ahead with a nuclear fuel recycling program at Rokkasho in Aomori Prefecture.

The decision comes at a time when international concern over Rokkasho is intensifying. It ignores International Atomic Energy Agency head Mohamed ElBaradei's call for a five-year moratorium on new nuclear fuel reprocessing facilities worldwide. Shunsuke Kondo, the head of the AEC, has said that it is “general knowledge” that the Rokkasho plant, which has not yet come into operation, is an existing facility, and therefore not included in the calls for a moratorium.

The granddaughter of Japan's wartime leader Tojo Hideki has become one of his staunchest public defenders since emerging from obscurity a decade ago. But exactly who is she and why has she come in from the political cold?

There is no mistaking the impact of the family genes on Tojo Yuko: she has the same myopic, almond-shaped eyes, thin mouth and wide cheekbones as her grandfather, General Tojo Hideki, who led Japan to disastrous defeat in World War 2. She even affects his rigid military bearing.

New Delhi - Seven years after blasting its way into the world's ‘nuclear club’, India has executed a major shift in its policy stance by jettisoning its long-standing advocacy of global nuclear disarmament in favour of nuclear nonproliferation. On Monday, the country's Foreign Secretary, Shyam Saran enunciated a new doctrinal orientation: India will now be “part of” a “new global onsensus on nonproliferation”.

[Japan's Unit 731 remains central to the fiercely contested China-Japan controversy over war crimes and war memory, and to the international debate on science and ethics. With a staff of more than 10,000, including many of Japan's top medical scientists, 731 and its affiliated units conducted human experiments, including vivisection, on Chinese and other victims in Manchukuo and throughout China between 1933 and 1945. The experiments tested, among other things, the lethality of biological weapons and sought to determine the ability of the human body to survive in the face of various pathogens and in conditions such as extreme cold.