Tokyo prosecutors consider summary indictment of ex-PM Abe officials: Asahi

6 min readDec 5, 2020

Fri, December 4, 2020, 7:42 AM GMT+6
TOKYO (Reuters) — Tokyo prosecutors are considering a summary indictment of two officials in former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s office for alleged violation of political funding laws, the daily Asahi reported on Friday.

Prosecutors believe the officials failed to report income and expenditures totalling some 30 million yen ($289,000) related to cherry blossom viewing parties held for Abe supporters when he was in office, the Asahi report said.

Under Japanese law, a summary indictment would mean the officials avoid a full court trial process. But the widely publicised case — which cast a shadow over Abe’s final term — may also prove a headline for his successor as Prime Minister, Yoshihide Suga, who defended Abe in parliament over the issue as his right-hand man at the time.

The Asahi said the two officials had admitted the illegality of the omission, which they told prosecutors was their own decision. Prosecutors decided to opt for a summary indictment given the admission of guilt and the amount of money not reported, the paper said.

Abe’s office didn’t immediately respond to Reuters’ request for comment.

Local media reported earlier this week that Abe himself has been asked by Tokyo prosecutors to attend an interview for voluntary questioning. Abe said he “hadn’t heard” about the request when asked for comment by reporters on Thursday, the daily Yomiuri reported.

The Asahi said on Friday that prosecutors were likely to question the former prime minister after the extraordinary session of parliament ends on Dec. 5.

Local media has reported, without identifying sources, that Abe’s office covered a shortfall of about 8 million yen in party costs, included in the 30 million yen of unreported income and expenditure. Abe repeatedly denied that claim during parliamentary hearings during his tenure.

(Reporting by Sakura Murakami; Editing by Leslie Adler and Kenneth Maxwell)

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Associated Press
Cargo ship attacked off Yemen under unclear circumstances
JON GAMBRELL
Sat, December 5, 2020, 4:43 PM GMT+6
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — A cargo ship traveling past Yemen in the Gulf of Aden came under attack in unclear circumstances, maritime authorities said Saturday.

The Gulf of Aden is a crucial route for global trade and has seen attacks attributed to Yemen’s Houthi rebels as its civil war rages on. A number of Somali pirate attacks that once plagued the region have mostly stopped in recent years.

The ship ended up off the small port city of Nishtun in Yemen’s far east after coming under attack early Saturday morning, according to an alert from the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Organization that is overseen by Britain’s Royal Navy.

“Vessel and crew are safe,” the organization said.

No group immediately claimed responsibility for the attack. Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who have held the capital, Sanaa, since September 2014, did not respond to requests for comment. Nishtun’s port has been used by a Saudi-led coalition battling the Houthis on behalf of Yemen’s internationally recognized government.

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The British Defense Ministry declined to elaborate on the attack. The U.S. Navy’s Bahrain-based 5th Fleet, which patrols Mideast waterways, said it was aware of the incident, but declined to comment further.

Ambrey Intelligence, a British private maritime intelligence firm, identified the vessel attacked as the MV Hasan, a cargo ship flagged out of Sierra Leone that had been on its way to Salalah, Oman.

The Hasan is registered to Oasis Shipping Co., a Marshall Islands-registered firm with an address linking it to a Beirut address for Barhoum Maritime Co. A similarly named company also operates out of Tartous, Syria. An employee at the company in Tartous declined to immediately comment.

The eastern part of Yemen where the ship was attacked is held by the country’s internationally recognized government, amid its yearslong war against the Iranian-backed Houthis. It marked the fourth known attack against shipping in the eastern Gulf of Aden in 2020, according to the private security firm Dryad Global.

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Yahoo News
Republican lawmaker likens Trump vote-fraud crusade to the search for Bigfoot
Michael Isikoff
Michael Isikoff·Chief Investigative Correspondent
Fri, December 4, 2020, 7:00 PM GMT+6

It was only recently that U.S. Rep. Denver Riggleman, R-Va., had his epiphany: The supporters of President Trump were starting to resemble the people who he used to hang out with more than 15 years ago when — mostly as a lark — he would go on expeditions to the Pacific Northwest looking for Bigfoot.

“It was almost a cult or a religious belief system,” Riggleman said about his Bigfoot hunting days in an interview for the Yahoo News podcast “Skullduggery.”

Riggleman, then a National Security Agency contractor, never saw any sign of the mythical hairy behemoth believed by some to be hiding deep in the far-flung forests of North America. But his fellow Bigfoot explorers saw signs of the creature everywhere, especially at night.

“Everybody saw red eyes. They had rocks thrown at them. They heard hoots and hollers and screams. They saw bent branches that were the territorial markings of Bigfoot,” Riggleman recalled. “All I heard were friggin’ squirrels and birds screeching.”

Back then, Riggleman says, he quickly realized there was no way to have a rational discussion about the subject with Bigfoot believers.

“No matter what I used as logic, it was turned back on me,” Riggleman said. “There was no basis I could get to them where we had a common understanding of what facts were and what truth was.”

So now it has become, Riggleman told “Skullduggery,” with President Trump and his allies, who insist — without any credible evidence — that the 2020 election was stolen by Joe Biden and the Democrats.

“Look at Rudy Giuliani. Look at Sidney Powell. Look at Jen Ellis,” Riggleman said about the lawyers who have made repeated evidence-free claims about widespread fraud that took place in the 2020 election. They have, Riggleman said, taken small, isolated instances of voter fraud or election irregularities and “turned it into systemic fraud — and that’s turned into the NSA actually exploiting and injecting code into multiple voting machines that aren’t interconnected, that Dominion has implanted code from Venezuela, and that there’s an invasion of a United States military base” [in Germany, where computer servers used in the election are supposed to have been stolen].

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Tokyo prosecutors consider summary indictment of ex-PM Abe officials: Asahi

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